Yesssssssssssss.  I heart animals and I swear I'm getting to Australia within the next 2 years and if by the time I get there they are allowing people to have koala bears as pets, I might not come back.

Should Wild Animals Become Pets to Ward Off Extinction?

In February 2009, Australia's Environment Minister Peter Garrett made a depressing announcement. The Christmas Island pipistrelle bat — an inch-long winged creature no heavier than five grams — was about to go extinct. Articles about its imminent demise were accompanied by photos of the bat's minuscule body, barely big enough to embrace the full diameter of a human finger. In February, there were estimated to be just 20 bats left. One was seen fluttering around the island in August, but there have been no sightings since.

If the Christmas Island pipistrelle is truly gone, it will be the 23rd Australian mammal species to have become extinct in the past 200 years. The last to perish was the crescent nail-tail wallaby — a miniature wallaby the size of a hare — which disappeared from western and central Australia in 1956. Twenty years earlier, in what was perhaps Australia's most infamous extinction, the Tasmanian tiger met its end. The largest carnivorous marsupials to live in modern times, the tigers, which looked like large, striped dogs, were suspected of eating sheep, and a group of wool merchants put out a bounty in return for the dead animals. Those that were not hunted down and killed in Australia's southernmost state were chased out of their natural habitat by domesticated dogs.

The accumulation of tragedies like these has given Australia the shameful distinction of having the worst mammal-extinction record in the world. Half of the mammals that have vanished from the planet in the past two centuries have been in Australia. And though the continent is hardly the only place grappling with die-offs — many biologists have conceded that a mass wave of extinctions is now sweeping the globe — as the list of Australia's endangered species continues to grow longer, scientists there are looking for ways to put an end to the trend.

Mike Archer, a professor at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has long been a proponent of domesticating Australia's unique wildlife to keep it from disappearing. Archer has had sugar gliders employ his shoulder as transport, shared a bed with a cucumber-loving quoll and battled a swamp wallaby over a roast chicken. While he concedes that not all native animals make great pets (wombats and koalas come to mind), others do, and Archer is hoping that the government will start to legalize ownership of more native pets. "No animal that has ever entered [humans'] inner circle has become extinct," he says. "When you value something and have an emotional connection with it ... it simply doesn't disappear."

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