To give a fig, or not

I have been thinking about the article I read about de-extinction--bringing back, or attempting to, species that have gone extinct because of the doings of human beings on this planet. Not the dinosaurs. They went away much too long ago. But even the woolly mammoth is a possibility because scientists--and ivory hunters--keep finding remains preserved in ice. And DNA is available.

DNA is what makes possible this bringing back to life business.

We know about Dolly, but she wasn't extinct. But ten years ago they attempted to clone a certain ibex from the Pyrenees, but it died moments after its birth. It is now extinct. Even in ten years, though, they--those scientists who want to do these things--have improved methods and greater hopes.

Of course I am much interested in the passenger pigeon because I know it, know Martha, the last of that bird to live. She lived in captivity--in the Cincinnati Zoo--and died about 1914, her remains now preserved in a museum. I had my students do research on birds, Martha and her breed among them.

Birds present a more complicated challenge for de-extinction than do mammals, because the young grow within eggs, not a womb. Perhaps one day we'll read something exciting about the passenger pigeon, who once blackened the skies with its plenteous numbers. Hunted to extinction, and it didn't take long.

Can we? Should we? What would be the consequences if we did bring back some of the now extinct? I cannot answer. Something in me says, No, we should not. Something else in me says, Yes.

But I know little, really, of nature's delicate balance or of upsetting things, know nothing, really, of the possible consequences. Know nothing of the purposes these now extinct animals may have had or if they fulfilled those purposes. And I wonder if we, human beings, know enough to justify "meddling" with these things. Just because we can do something, does that mean we ought to? So, I say again. I can't answer the should question.

I know very well that many people don't give a fig about the passenger pigeon or the dodo bird or the woolly mammoth or that strange animal that looked like a wolf, was called the Tasmanian Tiger, and was actually a marsupial. Of course, I had never heard of it, the Thylacine, because it was extinct by the 1930s.

But I do. I give a fig.