Gone

It was with some sadness that I read recently of the "functional" extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin. I had a look at several news sites on the Internet. One in particular annoyed me. Not so much the editorial as the comments.

Someone had left a comment saying that extinction is happening all the time and that it is a part of natural selection and that the dolphin's extinction was just the result of its inability to adapt and therefore a necessary result of its unsuitability for survival. Survival of the fittest.

I wanted to make a long sarcastic reply, framed in business terms, about market economies and making room at the top for new blood, and how the dolphin had a fair crack of the whip but after twenty million years had failed to achieve results, and that therefore natural selection demanded that it be removed. That there are, as they say, two types of businesses; the quick, and the dead.

I also wanted to make a comment how other species were failing to be seen in China because of pollution and their inability to adapt to it, and the consequent fact that they were unfit and weak: that they were absent because they couldn't compete in the industrial landscape of modern China. I mean of course Olympic athletes.

It doesn't matter how aggressive, get-ahead, and cunning you are, it doesn't lessen the pity of something living that is lost for ever for no good reason, whether it is a natural process or not. What a tosser.