This past week, an endangered baby dolphin died because of human greed and selfishness. If you haven’t heard about this already, allow me to recap: a baby La Plata dolphin was found near the shores of a beach in Santa Teresita, a city in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina. The beachgoers who spotted it—instead of pushing further into the ocean—picked it up and proceeded to pass it around and allow other beachgoers to take “selfies” with it, while it was struggling to stay alive due to dehydration. And even after these people got their precious selfie, they simply left the dolphin to die in the sand instead of putting it back in the ocean, which even then probably couldn’t have saved it. In short, a rare creature was pulled out of the ocean, out of its habitable environment, passed around like a hot potato for Instagram/Facebook/Twitter fame, and then left for dead on the open ocean shore.
Words cannot describe how disgusted I am with the human race right now. As an ardent lover of animals, this incident has given more insight into the downfall of humanity and less hope for the uplifting of it. We simply do not know how to treat anything with care anymore. Trivial and ephemeral things like social media attention and “likes” on Facebook drive our greedy desires, and sometimes lives are lost because of it. It was one thing that a mammal of our oceans was extracted from water, but the fact that these people lacked the decency and moral compass to put it back in its only survivable habitat leaves me speechless. Would you leave a dog in the road to be hit by a car? Or your pet rabbit in the woods to be eaten by predators? No, you would return it to its safest environment, whether that’s a home or an animal shelter. What strikes me as even more distressing is that the first thing these people thought when they saw this rare baby dolphin was that they needed to take pictures with it, they needed some physical proof that they got up close and personal with an endangered species—they didn’t think to return this mammal back into the ocean immediately, they only thought about themselves.
We are driven by the ideas of fame and attention. These concepts plague our minds so frequently and so powerfully that we forget what is put at stake: another person’s feelings, another culture’s values, or in this case, another creature’s life. Not only did these beachgoers see the dolphin as an opportunity for fame and attention, but they also failed to realize the damage they were causing to this animal and, in turn, to our environment. So let me ask you all this: Was the selfie worth it?
