which goes into more detail, but basically I think a gov’t run and/or uncontained release of these animals is a very bad idea. I do think, however, that we will probably see larger private contained parks where we can go on photo or real safaris w/o having to go to a corrupt African nation.
The watermelons may be underestimating advancements in biology, however, when they want to replace extinct American animals with African ones. Why not just bring back the extinct indigenous animals, like ACT tried with the Gaur a few years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001008/aponline171938_000.htm ?
I wonder how long it will be before you can pay to hunt Saber Toothed tigers on a Texas ranch?
Phil Bowermaster
Mike
Welcome back to the world of the blogging living! We missed you.
On this:
I am hard pressed to remember a case where human introduction of a alien animal species to an ecosystem has not either driven native species to near extinction or resulted in plagues of the introduced species overrunning and depredating the ecosystem they’ve been introduced to.
Well, no news is good news. I imagine that for every catastrophic time this has happened, there have been one or two instances where nobody noticed because the effects weren’t that bad, or weren’t bad at all. For example, the wild horses that live in the deserts of the Southwest…I’ve never heard that they were a threat to any native species.
Or how about those flocks of wild parrots that have been identified in New York and San Francisco? I haven’t heard that they are doing too much harm to the “native” pigeons.
Jim Strickland
The original article ignores some hugely important differences between the African Savannah and the high plains. For example, how cold tolerant are the camels, lions, and so forth? I rather doubt they’d survive their first winter. Also, what is the lack of atmospheric pressure and the accompanying oxygen going to do to the animals’ ability to thrive?
The big question is water, though. The savannah of Africa gets a huge amount of rainfall in its rainy season. The high plains get much less moisture and get it in the form of snow, much of it in the mountains. The resulting plants are of a substantially different nature. There are animals evolved to eat these dry grasses, but one would doubt camels would be among them, or one would expect to find the wild descendants of the camels introduced by the U.S. Cavalry to still be in evidence.
This, by the by, is the same argument against the vegetarians who insist that land used for fodder for cattle would be much better used for direct crop production. The water for direct crop production is, to a large extent, not there in the great plains. Grazing herbivores are most efficient way to turn prairie grass, which humans can’t digest, into something we can.
As for Mike’s comment about local predators, I live where Mike lives, and I’m not certain I would entirely mind if the white-tailed lawn pests (deer) that infest my yard were eaten by the odd lion. It takes some getting used to, as when the coyotes and neighborhood cats set upon the rabbits that also infest(ed) my yard, but I certainly wouldn’t miss the yearly coating of deer poop in my grass.