Yangtze dolphins yesterday. Gorillas today. I’m dreading tomorrow’s Metro in case there’s an article about a kakapo massacre.
All three appear in Douglas Adams’ utterly wonderful Last Chance to See, a sad, wise travel/conservation book that manages the good trick of being fantastically funny at the same time (see, for example, the Latvian students setpiece). After having an epiphany during an expedition to find the rare aye-aye of Madagascar, Adams joined the zoologist Mark Carwardine to see if they could track down some more endangered animals for a joint book and radio project. The series featured the Komodo dragon, the mountain gorilla, the white rhino, the kakapo, the Yangtze river dolphin, the Rodrigues fruitbat and some extremely endangered mice (individuals, not species, in the case of the latter. And yes, I am committing the sin of ripon* here).
The chapter focusing on the Yangtze dolphin is particularly haunting. The dolphins navigate navigated using echolocation, an increasingly ineffective method as the Yangtze grew to be one of the world’s busiest rivers. Tales abound of confused dolphins surfacing under boats and being mangled in their propellers, industrial waste poisoning the water and the fish, and after the team try to measure the noise pollution by lowering a condom-covered microphone into the river and record a screaming wall of noise, Adams writes that for the dolphins it must be like being “half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad.” During a fruitless attempt to find a live dolphin in the river, he reflects:
“somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain and fear.”
And now they’re gone. In the book’s epilogue, Carwardine prints a letter he received after the series had aired:
“Dear Douglas and Mark,
We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme – but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201. Sorry about that.
Yours,
PS Sorry, it was two dolphins – my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo.”
I wonder what it feels like, to know you ate two of the last of an entire species. Something approximating nausea, I hope.
My writing style favours swearing and sniping, so apologies for the thudding earnestness of the following: if you haven’t read Last Chance to See, please do so. If nothing else, I guarantee you’ll enjoy it for the jokes. But if you’re not currently doing anything to aid conservation efforts, hopefully it’ll inspire you to help the fight to stop any more critically endangered species going the same way as the Yangtze dolphin. As Carwardine concludes, the only reason you need is simply this: “The world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
*Ripon: (of literary critics) to include all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them.
