Western black rhino declared extinct

From the BBC:

No wild black rhinos remain in West Africa, according to the latest global assessment of threatened species.

The Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has declared the subspecies extinct.

A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says.

The annual update of the Red List now records more threatened species than ever before.

The IUCN reports that despite conservation efforts, 25% of the world's mammals are at risk of extinction.

Note that these are just the big, showy animals. I blogged about the hirola, an African antelope, just last week. But what about the countless species which aren't as glamorous? We're losing them, too.

We're also destroying our oceans, something which is out of sight, out of mind for most of us. Well, when we won't even accept the science behind climate change, because we prefer to stick our heads in the sand, who's going to bother about destruction happening under water?

In grade school, I was taught about the mistakes of the past - the wholesale slaughter of buffalo and whales, the killing of egrets and whooping cranes for their feathers, the death of the last passenger pigeon, tasmanian tiger, and dodo. The implication was that we'd learned from those mistakes.

But we didn't learn anything, did we?