This could be mammoth undertaking (Jan. 21)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Some very smart scientists have decided that it finally is time to bring a mammoth back to life. The mammoth in question is a baby, which was found intact in Siberia, frozen solid.
These scientists have taken tissue from the little mammoth and believe they can use that tissue to clone a mammoth baby.
Accomplishing this is much harder than it sounds. But these geneticists are anxious to get going and bring mammoths back to the earth’s biosphere.
I admire their ambition, but I also wonder why they would want to do this. We know mammoths once lived around here, and they were big animals. If they were to come back, we couldn’t let them run around unsupervised. We would have to put them in zoos or parks.
Mammoths were bigger than present-day elephants. They had long, curled tusks. They had few natural enemies. Yet, they disappeared.
Some believe humans may have hunted them into extinction. That might not have been easy for humans to do.
Buffalo hunters in the 1800s almost hunted bison into extinction, but they had repeating rifles, and the buffalo were easy pickings.
People who coexisted with mammoths didn’t have rifles. They had spears and bows and arrows, but mammoths were big and tough. It would have been pretty scary to hunt mammoth with such weaponry.
It would have been scary to hunt saber-tooth tigers or short-faced bears, too.
The paleontology site at Fairmead has yielded no evidence that people lived with these big animals when they roamed around here. But you can bet that if these animals came back, once the novelty wore off, we couldn’t wait to get rid of them.
The mammoths would eat the leaves off everything in sight; the saber-tooth tigers and short-faced bears would make quick work of cattle herds and sheep flocks.
Maybe the mammoth-lovers should rethink their project — or at least buy some very good liability insurance.
