Come on, folks. We’ve still got half of them to go and time is running out

Well now, according to the latest stats from the World Wildlife Federation we have by now wiped out half the animal population of the planet. Good enough job in itself, but come on, people, we’re not there yet. We still have half to go!

But, credit to us, we’ve done that task since 1970. Well, that’s not too bad for 44 years. That means we’ve got until 2058 to get the rest of them suckers, with all their pooping in the forests and scaring the kiddies in elementary schools that have been built verging on those same forests.

British Columbia, whence I am writing this, continues to do a stalwart job of killing the big scary things like bears (blacks and grizzlies, and feels a tinge of regret that we don’t have any polar bears to kill) and cougars. Now cougars are real dangerous (in fact they are) and yet they persist in proliferating in our remaining forests – we’ve worked hard to wipe those out as well – and again scaring school kids and especially their moms.

As I say we have a way to go yet. But at least we have a government that seems (and I may be wrong) to not give a shit if we carry on carrying on getting a bead on those nasty muthahs with fur and big teeth.

But I shouldn’t indict my fellows in this province exclusively, the rest of the world is carrying on with the task of ridding their environments of lions and tigers (you’ll note how I resisted adding bears and hence could avoid the “oh my”) and rhinos and virtually everything else that isn’t real cute. We do like the real cute critters like pandas and koalas and baby seals, but everything else seems to be fair game in the eyes of so called conservation bodies of the official state-sanctioned sort (not organizations like the WWF), hunters and especially poachers in the poorer parts of the world who blithely kills rhinos and tigers and elephants so rich fucks can get richer on ivory trading, or impotent old Asians can try to get it up with stuff from tigers and rhino horns.

Oh, and shark-fin soup. Don’t get me started on that. Simply disgusting practice that should carry the death penalty for those who participate in that scourge – in my humble opinion.

It’s not just the big stuff that we’re working hard to get rid of. There is the matter of the little honeybee and how we’ve been doing our utmost to be rid of them planet-wise. Caveat here those who like the proliferation of pesticides, you just might regret decimating these little guys.

Bees are, of course, very small. And even smaller are krill. Krill are the little teeny-weeny ocean-born crustaceans that happen to be the mainstay diet of blue whales, and other cetacean sorts. A blue whale, in the summer months, scarfs down four metric tons of krill a day.

Yet, innovative ole us have decided that a trendy little supplement for the hyper-neurotic is a substance called krill oil, so we are harvesting whale nosh. Really, they advertise it on TV all the time. We didn’t succeed in wiping out the world’s whales (efforts of the Japanese, Danes and Icelanders notwithstanding) so we’ll get ’em. Let’s take away their grub!

My only consolation is that by 2058 I’ll be too dead to care very much, but those of you with tiny kids or grandkids should perhaps pay a bit of heed, for their sakes. That’s if ebola hasn’t taken out the rest of us by then.