Western black rhino declared extinct
 

Wonders never cease, and neither do horrors. :(
The western black rhino has been declared extinct. Does that bother you? | Open thread | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Yes, that bothers me.

Did humans cause this or did they slowly just die off

From an extended link I read (which I can't quite find now, unfortunately), it claimed that the fault of this was mostly due to excessive poaching. :(

:(

If it's poaching, that's worse... people who can't abandon superstitions around endangered animals, or the want for pieces of an endangered species to put on their wall. In a way, it's a lot more sad that even a species lost through environmental damage.

:( :'(

Noooo. What happened to the breeding programs in the national parks/wildlife reserves?

I think a few still exist in zoos. They're just not in the wild, right?

I'm not sure..But if there were some in zoos the species wouldn't be extinct right?

There's such a status as "Extinct in the Wild", but this one is apparently fully extinct - it was a rare subspecies and there aren't examples of every species in the world in zoos.

Then that's even worse. I was sure there was a breeding program going on in at least a few places. I wonder what happened.

This has happened before in various places in the world... Where certain species have been decleared extinct, but are later to be found in very, very small numbers spread a far distance apart in some of the most remote areas... I really do hold hope that this is the truth here.

If not however, this is very very sad news indeed. :(

It's impossible to keep examples of every single subspecies, even with breeding programmes - many endangered species are present, but not every subspecies.

So people have managed to drive a species extinct, because of their own paranoia about not being able to get a hardon (the tusk is supposed to be a medicine for ED, or so I am told)?

Why does this not surprise me? :facepalm:

And I'm rather sure you can get the exact same thing from your toenails. :(

Well, while I think poaching did give that species the last kick over the edge to exctinction, I am sure that it was hunted to the brink of that in the times of the colonial safaries and such before and also that it suffered greatly from habitat destruction. This is the story of so many large species. The small ones however are sadly often unnoticed. Numbers range up to 200 species a day that go extinct. Of course that includes insects and amphibians and such rather unnoticed species :s - And even if that number really is too high and it is only half as many, that still is crazy. Even if it is completly off and it is only 10%, that is so much more than what happened in the past. It is so sad.

By the way, there is a documentary "Last chance to see", originally by Douglas Adams that was revisited last year. They tried to find the northern white Rhino, which was on the brink of extinction in the original movie about 20 years ago - they could not find it :(