A mammoth task if you are dead as a dodo 

February 25, 2023 06:51 pm | Updated 06:51 pm IST

The dodo, a flightless bird is, well, dead as a dodo. The plan to bring back the extinct species, therefore, might affect both the animal kingdom and the English language. We will have to find something deader than a dodo, or at least as dead as one, to convey a particular shade of meaning. Some things are dead as a doornail, but that sounds inelegant. Do doornails exist at all? Perhaps we need to bring those back too. 

A company in Dallas is looking to de-extinct (that’s the word used) the dodo, and perhaps even the woolly mammoth. The last dodo was killed in 1681 in Mauritius — scientists can be very specific about such details. This is an example of man-made extinction.

Actually, the dodo was last seen a couple of centuries later in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and turned from a stupid bird into something cute and cuddly.

If the dodo experiment succeeds, it is good news for mankind which is now destroying the planet. It means we can rebuild it animal by animal. Rather like in Groundhog Day, everything can be back to where it was at the start of each day. You can kill the last cat or pigeon on a Monday, and rest assured that by Tuesday, it (or something like it) will be among us again. What species you would like to de-kill? 

On the other hand, should we be spending our time and money on de-extinction which might lead to re-extinction, when preventing extinction (my apologies for using that word thrice in the same sentence) might be the more sensible way to go? The de-extincters could argue that re-assembling might be superior to mere prevention. 

Bringing a species back to life is not the same as bringing an individual back from the dead. You might be able to bring back a dodo, but not a favourite aunt or Alexander the Great. Or maybe that is the next step; who knows? We seem to have got onto a slippery slope. 

And anyway, who will decide these things? The sheriff of Dallas, the CEO of the company, the United Nations, Scotland Yard or descendants of the man or woman who killed the last dodo? Some might want a dinosaur revival, others the ivory-billed woodpecker or the most-recently extinct Garrett’s tree snail. Does mankind as a whole get to vote on it? 

To see a dodo or a woolly mammoth holding up the traffic in our cities could be traumatic. Dodos don’t fly and mammoths are, well, mammoth. Such animals have contributed more to our language than our daily life.

And anyway, their presence could give rise to a rival group – the re-extincters whose purpose in life is to eliminate the freshly revived birds and animals till the last one disappears from the face of the earth. We can’t oversee the cycle of life and birth in our laboratories.

Personally, I am for leaving things alone. Everything is as it should be. Let sleeping dodos lie.

(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu).

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