The northern white rhino isn't going out with the thundering charge that it's due. It won't go out in a blaze of glory, fighting a pride of lions, as would befit such an inspiring creature. It's going to die sad and old, withering away under armed guard in central Kenya while dozens of scientists - and millions of other humans around the world - look on, helpless.
It's not that scientists have given up on the animal. They haven't. But even the researchers who are pouring immense resources into technology to preserve the subspecies, which recently lost its last male, acknowledge that we are past the point of no return.
If you feel like you've heard this story before, you have. It's the same way the western black rhino and Vietnamese Javan rhino went out. It's the same story as the Chinese river dolphin, the Pinta Island tortoise (including the famous "Lonesome George") and the passenger pigeon.
And if you're tired of hearing it, that's too bad. Because dozens of iconic species are lining up to join them. You see, the stories we have seen in recent years - where a species tilts ominously toward extinction and scientists rush in at the last second to save them - that used to be the exception.
Today, it's the new normal. Modern conservation is increasingly about maintaining insanely thin populations with shallow gene pools. Not only is this expensive and often futile, but also it undermines the whole point of wildlife management.
Last year, I spent six months writing about the doomed vaquita, the world's smallest porpoise and rarest marine mammal. I was struck by two things: first, how preventable the mess was. Mexico has been focused on the vaquita since the early 1990s, and yet its policies have only served to inflame locals and encourage poachers, who catch the animal in their nets while chasing a valuable fish for traditional Chinese medicine.
Second, everything changes when a population gets too low. In the past, managing for a species such as a spotted owl or a bald eagle wasn't really about that species but about the ecosystem in which it lives - such as preserving old-growth forests or getting rid of toxic chemicals.
But if a species gets down to just a couple dozen individuals, a whole new problem emerges: genetics. Scientists need to be careful with breeding to stave off health problems. When Florida panthers dropped to about 20, scientists were forced to breed them with Texas cougars. This saved the subspecies but also changed it forever.
Red wolves dropped to even lower numbers, but a targeted captive breeding program brought them back to a couple hundred (pretty inbred) animals. Will that be a problem? Are there so-called lethal alleles - fatal genes that sometimes pop up in very small populations - that will cause them to suddenly die? Should we go in and edit their genes to fix what inbreeding has done, as experts are trying with the pink pigeon? Or maybe, as has been argued with tigers, we should just change the classification of the animals so that there are fewer subspecies and thus fewer barriers to carting them across a continent to refresh the gene pool. Because all it takes is one bad season or one disease (or one mistake while transporting them, as we saw with black rhinos this week) to cripple the species.
Seeing a trend? These are profoundly disturbing choices. In the old days, we used to worry about how many acres were needed to maintain a species and whether a corridor might keep animals connected. Today we have to figure out whether there is a gene that will kill off the entire population before we can get them all into zoos and breed them in test tubes.
And we're still not sure how living in captivity for generations on end might change an animal. In 1987, when biologists put every California condor in captivity to save the species, it was front-page news for years. Today, there are about 200 species of birds alone in similar endangered straits.
This is not to blame the environmental community or take away from the accomplishments of biologists and activists across the globe. (We have them to thank for rebounding bald eagles, Siberian tigers, giant pandas and all the southern rhinos.) But they are just no match for all the things pushing animals toward extinction.
When I was a kid, my first exposure to science writing was a magazine called Zoobooks that would profile different animals. I remember being baffled as to why so many were endangered. But I also remember being comforted by the magazines themselves. It meant people would do something. Orangutans will be just fine; Zoobooks was on the case.
But as someone who has been covering this topic for years now, I can tell you, it probably won't be fine. Conservation is not winning. And even when it does, like with the red wolves near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, it still loses. This was an animal that successfully returned from just 14 individuals. But in a story eerily similar to the vaquita, local and national politics forced local managers to all but give up on the animal.
My Zoobooks used to tell me that when an animal goes extinct, it's one more step toward our own extinction. But I know this isn't true. Humans don't need pink pigeons or rhinos to survive. This isn't about saving humans, or even animals. It's about saving our humanity.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)