TIL that there is a flourishing business consisting of digging up mammoth tusks from the Siberian permafrost and selling it to China, as a substitute for prohibited elephant ivory.

tillimarleen, 10 months ago

did you also read about the woolly mammoth because of the pyramids?

zephyreks, 10 months ago

What keeps us from farming elephants? People already farm sturgeon for caviar.

cheery_coffee, 10 months ago

Primarily I think people just don’t like it, they’re one of the smarter animals (I don’t know why we overlook the intelligence of pigs) and by all accounts quite sensitive and gentle.

I assume if we could farm them then we would have, they’ve been used for entertainment and militarily for thousands of years. Maybe with our technology we’d have a better run, but then we’d be confronted with point 1.

Do zoos count as farming though?

cheery_coffee, 10 months ago

While this is better than killing elephants, I still don’t like it…

yetAnotherUser, 10 months ago

I mean, they’re probably destroying a lot of Siberian ice to do this, so it might even have the same ecological impact as something like mining, I think

lvl7susceptible, 10 months ago

Yeah. Permafrost has a lot of carbon stored in it. The more digging humans do, the more is released into the atmosphere.

It also starts a chain reaction and causes more to melt.

youtu.be/HvKpnaXYUPU

xoggy, 10 months ago

Just in general, mammoth fossils hold a lot of information that could tell us about the history of the local environment of those areas or new insights into the creatures’ lives as well. Also it’s not like more of this finite resource is still being produced or anything.

Igotz80HDnImWinning, 10 months ago

Defrost the extinct zoonotic infections, can’t wait!