Bring Back The Mammoth

[poliphilo]

Mike and I talked about the weather as English people do. I told him about our unseasonable blizzard, he told me about his typhoon.

The snow had thawed by yesterday afternoon. We drove into town; the daffodils along King's Rd were still upstanding- if a little ruffled-  and the magnolia outside the Full Gospel church had hung onto most of its blooms. 

I watched a programme about mammoths last night. Professor Alice Roberts was crunching over the permafrost, blowing out clouds of golden smoke. We know a lot about mammoths, thanks to all the frozen carcasses they left behind in Siberia. We've sequenced their DNA and the Japanese are in possession of bone marrow and hope to produce a clone within the next five years. Alice said this raised moral issues, but I don't see what they are. It's just animal husbandry. We mess about with nature to produce meatier beef-cows and show-dogs with curlier tails, so why not a hairier elephant? 

Comments

[tljustenkhabl.livejournal.com]

You started from wrpng direction, I think...
Imagine, somehow you succeded and here we got hairy elephants - a lot of them! And where will they live? In contemporary Canada and Siberia they just won't survive because of poor soil, permafrost, etc. - they will extinct one more time.
First, you have to crate a proper ecosystem for them. And there are some projects for this, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Pleistocene Park- What an interesting project!

I don't suppose the scientists are planning to resurrect a huge number of mammoths, but who knows?

[tljustenkhabl.livejournal.com]

The point is exactly to resurrect whole pleistocene fauna - it will give us, mankind, new opportunities. Such as to eliminate hunger for ever by getting whopping territory of Northern Canada and Siberia back to being fertile Steppe and Prairie.
And yet we will have more variety of species by restoring Pleistocene Fauna.
Everybody will be happy!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose we could end up farming mammoths. I wonder what they taste like? Clearly our ancestors found them edible.

[tljustenkhabl.livejournal.com]

Very likely, yes, edible.. But I don't think farming mammoths would be economicaly justified - elephants generally grows too slowly. But if such activity isn't very burdening - like farming polar deers - who knows?
And it would be completely different world, in comparrison to contemporary one. It's compelling fortune for mankind.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think the world will be a very different place in 100- even 50- years time. It's good to get these little glimpses of a possible future.