By Simon Caterson
ENVIRONMENT
Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction
Barbara Allen
Reaktion Books, $49.99
If you care about animal extinction then reading this book could cause you to weep. For author Barbara Allen, writing Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds was an upsetting experience. “I wrote this book accompanied by many tears. I could not stay dry-eyed reading about the slaughter of the great auk, the seemingly endless shootings of the passenger pigeon, the destruction of habitat.”
Indeed, feelings of grief and outrage are unavoidable when reading about how these species, along with others such as the dodo and thylacine, have disappeared due to human encroachment, exploitation and sheer viciousness.
Human beings are both the kindest and cruellest species, and this dichotomy is expressed no more plainly than in the way we treat other animals. So many of the 31 species described by Allen in this book were lost due to the destructive aspect of our nature.
Allen includes contemporary expressions of self-satisfaction, even glee at the wholesale slaughter of vulnerable species, as if animals that could be killed without effort somehow did not deserve to live. Species that evolved on remote islands, such as the dodo, were easy prey for the humans who circumnavigated the globe in the age of exploration. “Having never encountered humans before,” she writes, “some of the creatures did not realise the danger they posed. Many colonists labelled such behaviour, this absence of fear, as evidence of them being ‘stupid’.”
Benjamin, the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo in 1933.Credit: David Fleay Trustees
A 1909 report commenting on a thylacine kept at London Zoo stated that these animals evidently were “untameable” yet not intelligent enough to “know what they fear”. Allen describes how the last, neglected thylacine in captivity died in 1936 from exposure and malnutrition in a freezing cold concrete enclosure at Hobart Zoo. The thylacine was not recognised by the Tasmanian government as a threatened species until 1966.
A not dissimilar story of neglect relates to the Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared functionally extinct in 2006. According to Allen, it was “lack of money, poor planning, ignorance, incompetence and, saddest of all, apathy” that drove the decline of the world’s only known fresh water dolphin.
As difficult as it is to hear stories of extinction, these tales must be told if we are to prevent the loss of yet more species. Readers will be confronted to learn that “an estimated one in every ten unique Australian mammal species are now extinct”. Much of the loss of species taking place now is caused by human-induced climate change and the species are never even seen by most people: “Land slugs and snails account for approximately 40 per cent of all known animal extinctions since 1500.”
Allen includes different animals from around the world, with each story told in the first person “voice” of the last survivor of the species. It may seem an unlikely narrative device for a book of popular science, but it does suit the material. Hearing the ghost of extinction enables readers to process their sense of grief and shame while also learning more about the animals themselves and the circumstances of the extinction.
There were mass extinction events before Homo sapiens came along, and others, like the demise of the woolly mammoth, that occurred well before the beginning of the historical era. The accelerating rate of extinction that has happened over the past few centuries is on us and our immediate ancestors, however.
Allen, who is a Uniting Church minister based in NSW and has written several books on animals both extant and extinct, is clear on our moral responsibility to look after the natural world and remember what we have lost.
“To know the deceased is important in order to acknowledge it had existed, it had lived out its particular life within this shared and fragile world,” she writes. “Only by knowing, by learning, by getting alongside, are we able to seek forgiveness and then move on to ensure that other species are spared such a fate.”
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