How to avoid animal species becoming extinct twice?

Animals and other creatures, often invisibilized, have always coexisted and shared the world with humans and contributed to cumulative knowledge and scientific development. The emergence of so-called “Animal Studies,” consolidated at the beginning of the 2000s, as well as subcurrents within already well-established disciplines, such as “Multispecies Ethnography,” show a renewed interest in a relationship that has always existed. The re-examination of the theme under new lenses, it seems to me, stems from the perception of a world threatened by climate crises and environmental catastrophes. Would they, then, be symptoms of a global pathology?

If we look at disciplines in the biological sciences such as zoology, and within it, ethology, it becomes evident how animals are at the center of the creation of scientific knowledge. In the health sciences, experiments with laboratory animals to develop, for example, a vaccine like the COVID-19 vaccine, which acts against other microscopic organisms to save human lives, also demonstrate how multispecies relationships have always been a precondition for scientific production. The use of horses in the production of anti-venom serum and llamas in the production of antibodies that neutralize HIV strains are just two examples among many that accumulate. They show that the relationship between science and animals has been to instrumentalize them for human well-being. There are disputes within the life sciences concerning animal ethics, but due to limited space, I will not delve into that here.

Let’s now look in another direction in the scientific universe. We come across with social and human sciences that aim to decentralize the human and break with their own foundational basis: anthropocentrism. Concerned with the agency of everything – spirits, objects, fungi, animals, and so on – social scientists and environmental humanities researchers strive to prove that animals have agency, often without success in convincing sociologists, who still resist the idea that agency extends beyond humans. Another obsession, this one stemming from classical Philosophy, is rationality (after all, cogito ergo sum). Based on the idea of natural hierarchies among living beings, we postulate that humans are indeed animals among other animals, but are, however, rational animals, which differentiates them from the others. Therefore, social scientists and humanities scholars who are “riding the wave” of multispecies studies, animal studies, Anthropocene, etc., find themselves confronted with the challenge of demonstrating that animals not only have agency but are also endowed with reason and even participate in political life.

If, on the one hand, we have a utilitarian view of life beyond the human, and on the other, we have the philosophical premise of overcoming anthropocentrism, the dystopian reality in which we live crosses us faster than electrons in a particle accelerator. News stories on the same topic shocked the community (civil and scientific) on April 7th of this year: the return of dire wolves (Marks 2025; Kluger 2025). Extinct for at least 10,000 years, dire wolves were canids over one meter tall (slightly larger than current gray wolves) that roamed the American continent. Earlier this year, the company Colossal Biosciences announced the birth of dire wolves Romulus and Remus, products of the most modern genetic engineering that science is capable of offering. The main reason? According to the company, advances in genetic engineering can help endangered species by gene-editing them and bring back other extinct species. In other words: let’s not worry about mass extinction, it’s reversible. Of course, shrewdly, the cofounder of Colossal, Ben Lamm, makes the opposite point: according to him, this experiment merely proves that genetic engineering should be the last resort, because a species will not return to what it was before. He refers here to the crossing of dire wolf genes with gray wolf genes, a necessary action to bring the extinct animals back. So, he argues that, for a zoologist, Romulus and Remus are not dire wolves.

Mythological Romulus and Remus being nurtered by a she-wolf. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

And it is in these peculiarities that the central issue of the problem is lost: while we discuss animal agency or the utilitarian use of animals in laboratories, private capital companies are developing false solutions to a true crisis with announced catastrophic consequences: mass extinction. At best, what the tests that led to the birth of these poor dire wolves offer is an excuse to continue with suicidal and genocidal practices, businesses, and policies. That is, they are reactionary to the point of being committed to maintaining the status quo. The story gets even more insane when you look at Colossal’s founding objective: the return of mammoths. Reality surpasses fiction and this dystopian universe we live in is in contradiction with several other universes in which we do not live directly, but in which we are partially involved. For example, regarding the return of dire wolves, Lamm states that:

“Our long-term goal is to put them back into expansive ecological preserves, but to do that in a way that’s far away from humans, far away from cattle, far away from everything that there would be conflict around, and probably on indigenous land because of the spiritual connection to them.”

The reader must be asking “Pardon me, did I understand correctly?” Yes, the statement is obscene on several layers. Firstly, the company does not know what to do with these wolves and has nowhere to put them, only speculating about what this place should be like. Secondly, they are concerned about possible conflicts purely of an economic nature, already stating that the predators will be far from cattle. As we know, cattle in our capitalist society are not sentient beings; they are livestock. Thirdly, it would seem naive, if not clearly cynical, to state that it is possible to bring an extinct animal back to life in a way that does not create socio-ecological conflicts, wherever this animal may be. Fourth and the most problematic point of all: the wolves must be placed far from humans, but in Indigenous reserves. The implication of this phrase is clear, direct, and blatant: Indigenous peoples are less than human. It’s almost as if they were saying “let’s put together two categories of non-humans who no longer belong in today’s world.” Fifth and last, what spiritual connection does a contemporary Indigenous person have with an animal extinct more than 10,000 years ago? Here, American indigenous cosmology is being instrumentalized to dump a technocapitalist problem on the backs of those who have nothing to do with it. Furthermore, such cosmology is distorted. This view reveals an essentialist and colonizing version of the connection that indigenous peoples have with animals.

But then, what connection would this be?

This theme will be discussed over two days (June 17th–18th) at the “Entangled Lives: Exploring the (Inter)Dependency Between People and Animals in the Americas” workshop at the University of Bonn. The workshop will bring together researchers from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and history to discuss relational ontologies of the American continent within the “human-animal” framework, the frictions caused by the shock of colonization in the relationship with and creation of animals, the impact of the enslavement of humans and animals on socio-ecological relations, and how animals challenged the colonization of the continent. Furthermore, this workshop aims to collectively identify directions that future studies on animals in the humanities and social sciences can follow. Beyond demonstrating the processes of exploitation, enslavement, and commodification that animals suffered from American colonization, we propose to think about and develop tools to decolonize research on animal-human entanglements. Therefore, bringing together disciplines such as archaeology, history, and anthropology enables us to visualize how such relationships were established and maintained, how and in what ways they evolved, and how they are perceived in the present by Indigenous communities. This is a necessary step to challenge utilitarian views on animals in the sciences.

Workshop poster. Artwork by Maria Cecilia Bogado.

It seems to me that our role as researchers and members of the academic community is to challenge the epistemic relativism that allows for a reality where mammoths and dire wolves are brought back from extinction only to be extinguished a second time. At this point, overcoming the anthropocentric vanity of reviving such species to push the limits of science requires not the overcoming of anthropocentrism itself, but the annihilation of the very idea of the human. After all, it wasn’t long ago that we wrote “man” as a synonym for human and “mankind” as a synonym for humanity. This is because the idea of the human has always existed in a hierarchy that disguises itself as being based on kind, but is in fact based on degree. That is, the human is not simply the species Homo sapiens sapiens. The human has gender, class, and color. The human is essentially a white, cis, heterosexual, and non-peripheral male. Throughout the historical process, this idea gains additional nuances to serve the prevailing political-economic model, but in its essence, all those of the same species who escape the aforementioned adjectives are human, albeit a little less so. They are human, but dehumanized.

Therefore, directing our attention to human-animal entanglements requires questioning the very idea of the human and pushing the limits of science to forge a convivial reality that is ethical with life, in which solutions are not imagined from a premise of a “natural” hierarchy among living beings. The capacity to imagine must be elaborated in conjunction with other species, and the ultimate goal of the imaginative effort must be transformation and/or revolution.