Cyptozooa as Endangered Species

       Cyptozooa as Endangered Species

          Cryptozooa are supposedly hidden species, unknown to science. To be sure there are many real species as yet undiscovered, but cryptozooa are the popular ones, the legendary creatures occasionally sighted, but never confirmed.

          I’m with the skeptics on this; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don’t care to pry into witness’s motives, sanity or accuracy; just give me concrete proof. Until then, shrug.

          Finding a coelocanth at a fish market suffices. So will photos and videos. Fur and scat samples will do nicely, best of all is capturing the beast alive. But being passionately convinced doesn’t count; you could swear up and down it was Bigfoot you saw, but if the hair sample comes back bear, then it was a bear.

I grant that wild rare critters are elusive, for good reason; nonetheless, it’s hard to hide a lake brachiosaur from sonar.

I don’t recommend shooting Bigfoot as a zoological sample; what if he turns out, on closer inspection, to be some crazy homeless guy you’ve just killed? And in any case, cryptozooa are by definition rare; so I say they deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.

          Cryptozooa are rare, and so deserve conservationist protection; so you can’t take specimens of them, so you can’t prove they exist, so you can’t prove that they deserve conservationist  protection! That means Bigfoot and Nessie and Champie and the Chubacabra and the Mokele Mbembe are covered by the Endangered Species Act, but you can’t prove that they are!

          And suppose that you did kill Bigfoot, then what do you do with the body? Sell it to a museum? But then you’re liable under the Endangered Species Act. Eat it? That’s almost cannibalism; you’ll get kuru. Hide it away? But then why bother shooting it in the first place?

Thus environmentalism protects legendary wildlife, even when unenforceable!