Toughie is a 12-year-old frog with huge black eyes and chestnut-brown skin. Last week, he was found dead in the zoo where he lived alone, and another thread was torn from the tapestry of life on Earth.
Toughie was the last known Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog. When he expired, I happened to be reading The Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen, which 20 years ago sketched out what is well known today: we are the authors of a mass extinction event to rival the perishing of the dinosaurs. Despite such warnings, we’re still dancing on a tapestry that’s becoming increasingly threadbare.
In Johannesburg, 182 nations already signed up to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) have spent the last week debating new regulations.
There have been some positive steps. Cites has agreed a total ban on trading pangolins after the slaughter of a million in a decade. The African grey parrot has been given the highest level of protection, and Cites also ordered the closure of domestic ivory markets.
But there’s one ignominious failure. There are 20,000 African lions left in the wild and about 1,500 are hunted as trophies each year. Trade in wild lion parts has been banned by Cites but, in a compromise agreement, the export of lion-hunting trophies remains legal, as does the international trade in bones, teeth and claws from captive-bred lions.
Ignoring conservationists who point out that every legal market contributes to illegal wildlife trade, the EU helped broker the lion deal. A spokesman said: “It is the nature of compromise that not everyone gets what they want.” In this age of extinction, it seems politicians are dodos.
So why didn’t you save the lion, grandpa? Well, we needed to compromise with the American dentist who shot Cecil and the South African farmers who breed lions for the Asian middle classes wanting bones for a prestigious quack cure.
The thing about extinction is that there can be no compromise. There’s no point pushing the lion’s extinction back from 2050 to 2060. And future generations will never forgive us for it.
Down with drones
Who needs real lions when we will soon have our lion-picture polyester shower curtains delivered by drone? Amazon is testing its weedy-looking miniature helicopters on the Gog Magog hills, undulations east of Cambridge that wouldn’t look like hills to anyone born outside East Anglia.
I’m an optimist and can’t imagine drones ever being smart enough for personalised deliveries in cities. But if they do permanently pollute the wide skies of East Anglia, I’ll be the first to sign up for catapult practice.
Wild man of Denmark
Rewilding is vociferously opposed by many Scottish lairds, whose post-Culloden dictatorship has been built on sheep farming and then deer stalking, creating a treeless, people-less Highlands. But the old-style laird may be facing extinction.
Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish clothing billionaire, now owns more than 200,000 acres of Scotland – more than the Queen – and could soon become the country’s biggest landowner. Land reformists criticise Scotland’s extraordinary concentration of land in the hands of a few, and Povlsen won’t change that – but his rewilding is revolutionary.
I’ve walked through his rewilded estate in Glenfeshie. It’s simple (reducing artificially high deer populations to enable a natural regeneration of native trees); grown up (no distracting promises of wolves); and the beginning, perhaps, of the biggest transformation of the Highlands since the clearances.
