1411…..or the era of the Cockroach?

1411- By now every one of us would be aware of this number; in case you didn’t know, that is the exact number of tigers left in India. The ‘Save our Tigers’ initiative, launched by Aircel and NDTV, has roped in stars such as Suriya, MS Dhoni, Baichung Bhutia to campaign for saving the tigers, which is incidentally the national animal of India (I had almost forgotten till I was reminded of this fact by these ads). The audience is asked to spread awareness through e-mails, social websites, blogs (this post is not one such), word-of-mouth and anything else that comes to mind.
Now the question I would ask is – Why ?
Is it because:
1: The tiger is our national animal.
2: It is cruel to kill animals for human pleasure.
3: As a policy, no species on earth should ever get extinct.

Let us begin with Point 2:
There is already a whole lot of jazz around us on the issue of cruelty towards animals, it is in fact a worldwide phenomenon. We have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) with two million supporters worldwide (Source: Wikipedia) or 3% of the world human population; and back home we have our very own Maneka Gandhi with her “People for Animals” and active involvement in various other animal rights related initiatives. I am assuming these organizations would certainly focus on ‘Saving the tiger’ as well along with various other animals, that may include mosquitoes, flies, and bees as well. So I really don’t think we need more people to spread the awareness, we especially don’t want Mr. Dhoni joining Maneka Gandhi’s camp, lest it affects his Cricketing performance adversely!

Point 3 – This completely contradicts the basic theory of evolution by Charles Darwin.
Darwin says that the mechanism of evolution of life essentially follows ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’. It just means that any living organism ‘naturally’ selects the most desirable traits required to adapt itself to its surroundings, and over a period of time the species that are the ‘fittest’ survive, whereas the others get extinct. Simple enough?
History has it that over 97% of species that ever lived are now extinct; and someone else says that 25% of all species known to mankind will become extinct in our lifetime. There have been a total of five “mass-extinction” periods in the history of the earth’s existence, the most notable of them being the extinction of Dinosaurs, that paved the path for the arrival of mammals and birds into the world (For details please refer – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction), and finally us Homo Sapiens. Had there been any resistance to the natural process of evolution, humans would not have been humans, we would have still remained apes. Or worse still, we would all have been single cellular amoebic organisms, or maybe even not that.

All I am trying to say is, this is exactly why one day even the tigers will get extinct; Rather, they need to get extinct, in order make way for something better, and fitter. Just like one day even the human race will become extinct and give way for a far superior species, right? Now this is what will be the “Sixth mass extinction” in the history of evolution. If this is how nature has intended life to be, then why tinker with it, right?

Finally, coming to Point No. 1 – Do we need to save the tiger just because it is our national animal? Now, how did the Tiger come to become our national animal in the first place? And why was the Tiger alone chosen as the national animal? Why not something else that had far lesser chances of becoming extinct within the era of the Homo Sapiens?
Just to give a different perspective – take the case of sport; Hockey was made our national sport at some point in history and it still remains so. But instead, it is cricket that the entire nation worships ah so religiously! This would perhaps be followed by Tennis, or F1 where India is nowhere in the world map; and yet Hockey is almost dying a natural death, just like the tigers of India.

So if the sole reason for ‘Saving our tigers’ is that it is our ‘national animal’, then it is surely not worth the efforts. I say – lets not bother about the Tiger being our national animal. Let us all just embrace Darwin’s theory, let the tigers reach a natural extinction, and let us create a new national animal. Something that is found in abundance. How about the Cockroach? Or the housefly perhaps; some of the most ubiquitous creatures you would find around. I am sure these animals would not get extinct for generations to come. Some scientists say that even in the event of a nuclear holocaust or aliens capturing the earth, the one species among all living beings that will truly survive is the Cockroach. So let us all join hands and spread awareness through e-mails, blogs, social websites, word-of-mouth and anything else – to make the Cockroach our National Animal!