And you say that the battle is over
And you say that the war is all done
Go tell it to those with the wind in their nose
Who run from the sound of the gun

And write it on the sides of the great whaling ships
Or on ice floes, where conscience is tossed
With the wild in their eyes, it is they who must die
And it's we who must measure the loss

"You Say the Battle is Over" - John Denver


I stumbled across a website about extinct animals last week, and it really struck me for some reason. Some of my favourite animals are ones that I've always known have been gone (like Thylacines). But I found that one, the Chinese River Dolphin (or Baiji) was just recently declared functionally extinct. I first heard of the Baiji in a documentary when I was about seven, and I always liked them. I had no idea that they were even that rare.

If you look into most of the 'large animal' extinctions in the last few centuries, most (but not all) have been a direct result of human actions. I'm not saying 'oh, the people cut down a few trees and that caused the birds to go extinct'; more like 'the people killed all the birds'. And the worst part is that a lot of the time people don't seem to have even realised what they were doing until it was too late to repair the damage.

There used literally billions of Passenger Pigeons in North America, so many that people thought they could never possibly be rare. They were hunted to extinction within a few hundred years. And the story repeats with many other species. People didn't even realise that the Quagga wasn't just a funny-coloured Zebra until it was long gone. Nowadays people have a better idea of what they're doing, but still don't really seem to grasp the full extent of their actions.

These thoughts wouldn't leave me alone until I did a painting based on them. If at least a few people 'get' what the picture means, it'll have been worth all the work I put into it.

From right, on the carousel:
Elephant Bird, extinct by the 1640s
Dodo, extinct by 1680
Quagga, extinct by the 1880s
Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), extinct in 1936
Baiji, believed extinct in 2006
On the ground, a Leopard, a Polar Bear, and a Rhino, all endangered but still hanging on.

Details
Carousel animals: [link]
Polar Bear: [link]
Rhino: [link]
Leopard: [link]

Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches