July 14, 2019
In Chapter 11, Kolbert travels to the Cincinnati Zoo to meet Suci, one of the remaining Sumatran Rhinoceros; Sumatran Rhinoceros used to be commonly found in many areas such as the Himalayas, Sumatra, and Borneo until they became endangered. They were taken by a conservative group to American Zoos, where some rhinos started dying because of disease-carrying flies and an insufficient diet. Kolbert introduces Dr. Terri Roth, a conservative director of the Cincinnati Zoo, whose job is to artificially inseminate the rhinos to preserve the species. When Kolbert pets Suci upfront while she was eating, Kolbert is amazed by the size of creatures such as rhinos. Before the Anthropocene era, which actually started many millenniums ago before the industrial revolution, creatures such as mammoths, rhinos, and other species that were generally considered large were successful herbivore animals. Their enormous size protected them from predators until the arrival of humans when their advantage became a disadvantage, or as the author puts their strategy a "loser's game". Many scientists acknowledged that the introductory of humans were responsible for the extinction of large creatures as everything synced in. According to page 230, "The megafauna extinction, it's now clear, did not place all at once, as Lyell and Wallace believed it had. Rather, it occurred in pulses". This connects to the APES Theme: Humans alter natural systems; Technology and population growth have enabled humans to increase the rate and scale of their impact on the environment. [R] Things like a drastic change in climate is not responsible for the extinction, because, from Alroy's computer simulations, humans together can take out one large mammal one by one because as the author puts it: humans were never "In harmony with nature".
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