This is pretty much the new crap with the "dire wolves"
Years ago I was in an airport and there was a tv where the news was doing an interview with a scientist, I couldn’t tell you what type, it was years ago. But the interview was about de-extinction, I think this was maybe right after the first new quagga were born. And the interviewer asked if we could bring back mammoths.
And she said probably— we have very well preserved specimens and elephants are closely related enough to probably carry them to term. Also we are absolutely not going to do that.
He asked why and she replied— the mammoth have no natural habitat we could release them back into. They were specialized for a planet in the middle of an ice age, they wouldn’t survive even if there was a safe place to release them. We would have to keep them in captivity and our standards of care for taking care of elephants are already not what they should be, let alone for a one of a kind previously extinct animal at odds with the climate. To bring back the mammoths would be an act of incredible cruelty for no purpose other than our curiosity.
I have to wonder if the situation with these “dire wolves” is similar.
Where in the world, in this world, where even normal wolves have been wiped out from huge swaths of their native range, would we put a dire wolf?
If a real dire wolf existed, and not the slightly bigger gray wolf they made, it would spend its life in an enclosure as basically a curiosity, cared for by people who have no experience with its species because it’s the only one that exists, in a world actively hostile to what it was evolved to be.
