Extinction Sucks

The burgeoning Indian population, and the constant threat of ivory poaching, have reduced the Asian elephant population to just 30,000. Aleisha Caruso, and her best friend Ashleigh Young, are two Australian girls determined to do something about it.

Sea turtles have swum the worlds oceans for over 100 million years they are one of natures truly heroic survivors. However in just the last 200 years human intervention has had an appalling affect on turtle numbers: Feral pigs gorge on its eggs, plastic thrown into the oceans is eaten and destroys their digestive systems and stray fishing nets ensnare turtles, causing them to die a slow, agonising death. Conservation duo Aleisha Caruso and Ashleigh Young refuse to sit back and wait for sea turtles to be wiped out forever.

Rhino horn still fetches a high price in Traditional Asian medicine, not as an aphrodisiac as commonly thought, but as anti-inflammatory, despite there being no proven scientific evidence for this. Because of poaching, there are now just 2,500 great one-horned rhinos left in the wild.

In many South East Asian countries, bears are kept in horrific, cramped conditions for a shocking, painful purpose: They are milked for their bile. It is believed the bile alleviates fevers. Such is the demand, bears are virtually extinct from the jungles of Vietnam.

The Tasmanian Devil was made famous by Warner Brothers as a crazed creature prone to bursts of anger. Its a dreadful irony that the real Tasmanian Devil has become just that, driven insane by a horrific facial cancer that causes the animal to die of starvation. Scientists believe they will be extinct within 20 years. As one of Australias most iconic creatures, conservation team Aleisha Caruso and Ashleigh Young are determined not to let this happen.

The rarest and smallest of all the worlds marine dolphins exist in New Zealand: In the North Island the Mauis dolphin, and in the South, the Hectors. And the single, greatest threat to the survival of the remaining 7,000 dolphins is entirely of mans making: fishing. The use of gill nets, a wall of death for everything caught in it, has caused the New Zealand government to introduce a ban in order to save the Hectors dolphin.