Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: A Spoon Too Short #3

 

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: A Spoon Too Short, Issue #3 begins a new arc, "Poached Like Salmon."  It starts 15 years in the past, when Dirk Gently is at a U.S. military research base, where nefarious U.S. government agents are testing a young Dirk Gently's psychic abilities using high technology.  In the present, Gently is in Kenya after "talking" with an elephant and declaring that he solved the problem of the N'Kawa tribe that lost their voices.  Meanwhile in London, where the Kingdom-Brown family is being sequestered in a hospital, Susan McDuff plays her cello for the patients, and lo and behold, they sing!  Jibberish, of course.

Dirk Gently's brilliance and stupidity are both on display in this chapter, as is Ilias Kyriazis's beautiful artwork, which I noted in my review of A Spoon Too Short, Issue #2.  I particularly liked the page where there were jigsaw puzzle pieces floating through the air, implying that Dirk Gently is about to make a connection.  I did note with some sadness that the rhino poaching operations in Kenya, Namibia,and South Africa reminded me of Douglas Adams's non-fiction work, Last Chance to See.  In that book, Adams recounted that rhino poachers made only $10 for a rhino horn.  He pointed out the difficulty in simply paying the poachers $10 not to poach the horn because then they'll poach the horn anyway and have $20.

Right now, rhino horns are big business for Boko Haram and other terrorist groups, with a single horn fetching not $10, but $300,000 on the black market.  With money like that floating around, there is simply no reason for them not to poach rhino horns, especially when Boko Haram has advanced weaponry.  There have been reports in Uganda that helicopters have been used to poach elephants, and I don't know how long it will be before they're used to poach rhinos as well.

So, is the solution zoo breeding?  The San Diego Zoo Safari Park has had remarkable success breeding captive rhinos, which then get sent to other zoos.  Similarly, zoos often take in elephants marked for culling in the wild for various reasons but mostly because they're past their breeding age and cause trouble in their native lands.  I fully support this, although I am wary of keeping any migrating animal pent up in an enclosure.  Elephants travel six to 10 miles per day in the wild, and migrate hundreds of miles seasonally.  This is a part of their basic nature, and by putting them in even sizable exhibits, we're taking away this basic nature of what it means to be an elephant.  It is the same for rhinos.  When we take them out of the reserves and into zoos, we're depriving them of one of their basic fundamental aspects of being.

Enough, enough.  Buy the comic.  It's good.