Eaten to extinction

It's no longer news that worldwide stocks of fish (or "seafood") are crashing due to over-harvesting, but for some reasons the message just doesn't resonate. Yesterday the NYT published an article tracing the route taken by illegally-caught seafood from Africa to Europe. It's somewhat heartbreaking how easy it is to illegally catch and transport seafood as opposed to land animals. We can't set up and patrol fish "preserves" on the high seas, and fish aren't exactly charismatic megafauna that people will rally behind. It's like, most Westerners would never eat, say, endangered giant panda, or California condor eggs, but have little qualms about eating endangered (or soon-to-be endangered) fish. Why is that?

Speaking of endangered animals, there's a couple of interesting stories from MSNBC today and yesterday. The first is on the washing up of twenty endangered Olive Ridley turtles in Bangladesh, believed to be from the use of illegal fishing nets near the shore. Second, there's a story on the potential removal of dams along the Klamath River in Oregon which may or may not help endangered salmon (Chris- comments?). And 45 minutes ago MSNBC reported that the Bush Administration has signed an exemption from the Coastal Zone Management Act for the Navy to continue using sonar in its training off the coast of California despite evidence that it is causes marine mammals to, you know, die.

And I was really impressed yesterday when MSNBC has this as the lead story-- a article about the rangers of Virunga National Park in the Congo who are assigned the task of protecting mountain gorillas on the verge of extinction. The park rangers are no longer able to do their job because the Park has become overrun with armed groups and poachers who kidnap rangers to work as guides, kill them, or pillage their posts for supplies and food. This story struck me because these rangers are clearly risking their lives to protect the gorillas (and an unsteady paycheck). I think it raises an interesting question of whether a given number non-human lives can ever equal 1 human life, and does it matter if the non-humans are (a) endangered, and (b) closely related to humans? A few years back PETA has this billboard campaign comparing factory farming of animals to the Holocaust, and it raised a huge controversy.