Changing the Default

Every couple years I see news of an effort to declare Bigfoot an endangered species. It’s always presented by a believer, anxious to get some government acknowledgement of their delusion. It typically results in much mockery.

If Bigfoot were put on the endangered species list, I can think of one immediate benefit. People might be a bit less likely to shoot at whatever grunting hairy bipeds they stumble across in the forest. Any such being they find are less likely to be Bigfoot than to be, well, me. So the plan gets my endorsement on that alone.

But I don’t think it goes far enough, because there’s a much broader issue at stake here.

Near the end of this week’s episode of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, they talked about newly discovered species. They mentioned several new finds from 2014 that aren’t fully described in the scientific literature. Some of the details are being kept secret to prevent poaching.

As it turns out, when a species is first discovered, it’s not considered endangered. This despite the fact that it must be extraordinarily rare, if it hadn’t been discovered already. These days when new species are discovered it’s often something that just lives in one very small patch of field. Anything more widespread would have been found.

There are exceptions, of course. It’s certainly possible to imagine that genetic testing might reveal that Antarctic Krill should be split into an eastern species and a western species, each of them outnumbering all land animals put together. But such cases will be rare and shouldn’t form the basis of the broader policy.

No matter what your view on the matter, there must come a point where investigations of the earth’s inhabitants have been thorough enough that anything yet unfound is on the verge of extinction. I think we’ve long since reached that point. I think the default stance should now be to put newly found species on the endangered list automatically, and only remove them if it can be established that they aren’t endangered. That would protect Bigfoot, and the Chupacabra, and the Ogopogo, and the One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People Eater. But it would protect the long-toothed pipistrelle bat as well, and that bat needs help faster than we can give it.