"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
Prague Zoo has those now, too, and proudly showing off the babies on their social media! That's people literally on the other side of the Earth invested in these bugs and doing their best to invest other people in them and their story of a rise from near-extinction, and the efforts to make Howe Island habitable for them again. And clearly doing an okay job because as someone who follows them I saw the beginning of this post, saw the image, and went "hey, I know that one!" I haven't actually seen them live yet - last I visited was in winter and I think the exposition was closed to visitors. (So, you know, this is really less about having a cool animal to show off to the visitors and more about THE BABIES. They're green!)
They've also been involved in the program of saving and now reintroducing the Przewalski horse since the very beginning of the program in the 1950s (and they hold the records for the international breeding program). And the reintroduction of horses bred halfway across the world back in Mongolia and now also Kazakhstan is happening with the help of the Czech army who's been giving the program the use of its transport planes for years.
So, hey, humans are actually pretty decent sometimes.
