The Odds (and Rocks) are Stacked Against Hellbenders

Earlier this year, rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, reported finding a hellbender which had been killed by a fallen rock.  This animal's death wasn't exactly natural causes, though - the rock which had crushed it was part of a stack made by park visitors in a stream, for... reasons?  The Park responded by issuing a statement/making social media posts requesting visitors not do such things in the future.

I very much doubt that the people who made the rock stack intended any harm.  I like to think that, if they knew what would happen, they wouldn't have done it.  People do stuff like this all the time as a sort of self-expression or creativity, a way of saying "I was here," and there are ways to do that that are safe and fun and creative.  This just ended up not being one of those things.  It's understandable that this wasn't on everyone's radar, but now that it is, it should be a "Well, now we know, let's not do that" lesson.

What blows my mind is the response from so much of the public.  Claims that its their God-given right to stack rocks.  Refusal to believe that it matters at all - since rocks move naturally in, say, storms or floods, and we can't control that, there's no harm in stacking rocks ourselves.  Refusal to believe that hellbenders are actually rare ("We see them all the time, everywhere, we just call them mudpuppies" - nope, different animal.  Also not okay to crush less-endangered animals with rocks).

I think of all the zoos working so hard to restore hellbenders to the wild, just to loose them because someone wants to make a cool rockstack for an instragram post (yeah, I wish I could convince myself that this was just kids playing).

The infuriating truth is that so many people take immediate umbrage to even the kindest of suggestions that they do something slightly differently, like "How dare you tell me what to do, you're not the boss of me!"  The saga of the squashed hellbender reminds me of a saying that I heard long ago.  We know what needs to happen to save virtually every species from extinction.  We know how to do it.  The problem is, most of it involves changing human behavior - and that's something we've never figured out how to do.