Guest Speaker - Dagmar Midcap (NBC 7)

It was a real treat listening to our guest speaker today delve into the challenges of protecting endangered species around the world. Dagmar Midcap, the evening weather anchor for NBC 7, started out by explaining how our local weather is really a product of weather elsewhere in the world, and drew the parallel with worldwide animal populations on the decline affecting us locally. She has taken up an impassioned quest to bring the story to the public through quarterly half-hour TV specials of her trips all over the globe, the next one airing on Thanksgiving. Excerpts from her video “The Extinction Crisis” showed how Southeast Asian cartels are killing rhinos for their horns to the point where only 80 Sumatran and 50 Java rhinos remain as of her January trip to Africa. She has participated in airlifting elephants (not an easy task!) to new eco-environments to save them from poachers and encroaching civilization. Collar-tagging giraffes might seem easy with their “XLT+” neck size, but becomes a dangerous evolution for both the animal (which doesn’t normally lay down) and the humans sitting on their necks while the giraffe is only semi-sedated. As Dagmar pointed out, the tags are actually placed in their ossicones (horns) for safety reasons. And who would have guessed the most endangered predator species, and the hardest to track with tags, is the fascinating wild Painted Dogs of South Africa? Something Dagmar mentioned, that we might consider sponsoring in our mission of supporting Peninsula Youth, is an educational program being developed where schools can be connected via satellite to specific South African “bore holes” where the students can interact with these endangered species real time and first hand. These water resources were once used by poachers to attract and exploit wild animals, and are now used to draw animals to protected areas to save them. We thank Dagmar for making all of us aware of the crisis at hand, and particularly for getting up so early after the 11 PM news to be with us this morning!