You might’ve seen the news about a company that says it brought back the direwolf �?those giant wolves from thousands of years ago. Sounds cool, right? Like something out of Jurassic Park. But let’s slow down and take a closer look.

There’s a lot of hype, but not much truth.

First, this isn’t really about saving animals. It’s more about making money and putting on a show. A company called Colossal Biosciences says it has created the first “de-extincted�?animal. People are excited, and the company is now worth billions of dollars. But the so-called direwolves they made? They aren’t even real direwolves. Scientists used a few old fossils and mixed them with modern gray wolves to make something kind of similar. That’s like saying a copy of a van Gogh painting is the same as the original—it’s not!

They’re not trying to bring back animals for nature. They’re choosing animals like woolly mammoths, dodos, and Tasmanian tigers because they’re famous, not because it helps the planet. It’s kind of like how people make a lot of cat videos—not because cats need help, but because people love watching them.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of animals alive right now that do need help. Forests are being destroyed, oceans are polluted, and many animals are in danger of going extinct—but no one’s spending billions to save them. Instead, they’re spending all that money to bring back a few famous creatures that will live in luxury, like the “direwolf�?pups who are treated like celebrities. One is even named Khaleesi, after the character from Game of Thrones.

Real conservation means protecting animals in the wild, not making science experiments to entertain people. Pretending we can just “bring them back�?makes it easier to ignore the damage humans are still doing to animals today.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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