Fear the Were-Elephant

Apparently scientists in Japan are working night and day to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. They have borrowed a mammoth carcass from Siberia and are eagerly extracting the DNA as we speak. My conclusion? Scientists are brilliant, creative people but they shouldn't be permitted to set their own agenda. OK; mammoths are cool, positively frosty in fact, but I wonder how much thought has been given to the possible consequences of their return.

For starters, how do we know that mammoths even existed? It is just possible that what we think are mammoth corpses are in fact the bodies of perfectly normal elephants that were afflicted with the terrible curse of lycanthropes. Scientists will take this infected DNA, impregnate an elephant (a female one for preference) and wait eagerly for the birth. Imagine their surprise when the mother gives birth to what appears to be a thoroughly normal elephant. This surprise will be as nothing to the total shock come the next full moon when the baby sprouts hair and giant tusks and goes on a killing spree. The global price of silver will skyrocket as armies struggle to cope with the new threat by investing in some seriously expensive artillery ammunition. Honest elephants will huddle together in fear and curse our names as the twisted progeny of pachyderm hate stalks the night athirst for new victims. All in all, not a good outcome.

Of course the were-elephant theory might not necessarily be accurate or even likely (or sane) but there are other reasons to hesitate before telling Igor to raise the lightning rod. Mammoths are creatures of the snow. At least we assume they are based on the corpses we've found; a chain of logic which if it were applied to humans would indicate that we spend all our time in cemeteries. Still for the sake of what I will fatuously call an argument let us assume that the mammoth did indeed roam the icy wilderness. They're going to find global warming a bit of a bugger aren't they? I can see the headlines now "Mammoth Born-Dies of Heatstroke". Since elephants have a two year gestation period I can envisage that the mammoths will be dropping dead faster than we can squeeze them out. Mammoth extinction will become a daily affair as the last survivor dies before the next one is born. Half of the species becoming extinct at any given time will be the woolly mammoth. Frankly I don't think anyone is going to win the Frankenstein Prize for this one.

Finally suppose we do manage to successfully breed and keep alive mammoths what are we going to do with them. We can hardly keep them all in zoos (they'd shed everywhere) and we can't release them into their native habitat, their native habitat is the Pleistocene era. We could eat them I suppose and imagine all the fur coats you could get from one mammoth hide but it seems a bit mean to bring them back from extinction simply so we can kill them again (although don't put it past us). I rather suspect that some crazed super villain who has seen Jurassic Park once too often will corner the world market in mammoths and train them to unleash carnage on an unsuspecting populace.

When you're cowering in a dumpster and flying woolly mammoths are reducing the city to rubble with laser beams from their eyes if you happen to hear maniacal laughter that will be me in my Fortress of Doom.