Washington, DC -- The Endangered Species Coalition (ESC) warned Monday that unless global preventive measures are undertaken immediately to secure its continued survival, the world faces the irrecoverable loss of the most endangered species on the planet: Deitus Tyrannus, or God.
"One," said Brock Evans, Director of the ESC. "That's all we have left. Sure, here and there we find pockets of small communities still hanging on, but the lesson of history is that these will disappear with the introduction of the one god we must save."
Evans explained that gods are predatory cannibals, and the endangered individual has survived by ferociously eliminating its rivals. The natural course of events will result in the most vicious individual establishing itself as the sole remaining member of its species.
"This animal can thrive on its own, as it has demonstrated throughout much of the world," Evans said. "But it has a delicate biology that is extremely sensitive to how humans cater to its needs. It craves attention, and without it it will die."
Each god consumes its rivals by depriving them of attention by diverting their human audience to itself. When one of the creatures is abandoned by all the people who once talked to it, thought about it, brought it gifts and taught others to do the same it perishes. Biologists call the carcass of a dead god a "myth."
The study of dead gods, called mythology, has provided scientists with information about many packs of wild gods, each of which lived successfully for centuries under the attentive care of the ancient civilization that adopted it until it was abandoned for another and became myth.
Hope in Breeding, Ignorance
Conservationists now fear that God, whose rarity has led biologists to refer to it by the name of its species, is in danger of becoming myth by attention deprivation even in the absence of competition because its human audience is increasingly occupied with their own pursuits.
"If we keep obsessing over advancing our scientific knowledge, God will join Zeus and Osiris in the dustbin of history," cautioned Dr. Jackie Mayhew, a deitician with the San Diego Zoo. The Zoo has initiated the most radical approach in the deity preservation movement by attempting to coax God to breed.
"We know that newer gods are more appealing to people," Mayhew explained, "And the offspring of mature gods are generally very successful. If God impregnates one of the virgins at the Zoo, we're confident the species would survive for the next 2000 years."
Mayhew added that because God has not even tried to mate, "a little ignorance could go a long way" toward encouraging people to pay attention to God and help preserve an important part of the world's biological heritage. "It's a small price to pay," she said.
Experts say in this regard the United States stands first in the industrialized world, with high levels of ignorance due to public education being under constant pressure to remove controversial subjects from science curricula. Consequently, it is not surprising that the country is also the most conservationist, with 88% of people making God part of their lives.
The conservationists' platform is not without opposition. Some opponents rely on Nietzsche, an eminent 19th Century deitician, and urge people to accept that God is dead, the species is extinct, and just get on with their lives. Others cite the contradictory reports about what God is and what God likes and conclude that, much like the similar regional legends of Sasquatch, Yeti and Bigfoot, God is simply a cryptozoological farce.
Yet another group that is attracting a growing number of followers argues that, if in fact God is the last of its kind, it should be eradicated for the good of all humanity -- like the last sample of Smallpox virus.
