I ended my first blog post by asking what the point of reviving (or trying to) extinct species might be. Here, I want to take this question up and puzzle over it some more. It makes intuitive sense that, in the age of massive human-induced extinctions, the idea of reviving those already gone is gaining ground. […]
Category: Conservation
Purer than thou
You might have seen articles lately (for example here and here) announcing the return of the European bison (Bison bonasus), a seeming success story for the rewilding movement in Europe. Surely, it is a great thing to have an animal come back from the brink! However, what is less talked about, and what I want to […]
Looking back to go forward
Before humans domesticated wild animals, meaning before we managed to control the reproductive cycle of animals with the goal of using their abilities for our gain, there was a wealth of beasts that might have become servants of the human project. Only a fraction of them were amenable to domestication (as Jared Diamond has argued […]
The Civil Animal 