In the age of the Anthropocene, it is hard to avoid feeling as though humans have grimly succeeded in our mission to gain dominion over the natural world. We know what lives at the bottom of the Mariana Trench; we know what is frozen in the Antarctic ice; we know about the monsters that occupied the planet millions of years before humans even existed. We’re even making solid progress on figuring out how eels reproduce. While this magnitude of knowledge is impressive, it’s also melancholy: our encyclopaedic knowledge of nature is inextricable from our destruction of it. Though ecological science still makes innumerable monumental discoveries every year, it’s hard to avoid feeling like we’ve found all the most significant species—generally speaking, large vertebrae. There is therefore a joyful disruption in finding an entirely new, large mammal species like the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis).

The saola is one of the rarest animals on the planet. Identified by Western science in 1992, it was the first newly described large mammal since the okapi in 1901. It’s not a conscious achievement, of course. The saola didn’t know we were looking for them. They live in the Annamite Range, which stretches through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Annamite Range is home to a considerable number of rare species, many of which are seen nowhere else in the world. No one knows for certain why this is so, but the leading theory is that these species once existed across a broader habitat before anthropogenic threats forced them into a smaller, more secluded area. The animals that live in the Annamite Range are likely the remnants of once-abundant populations. They survived by finding somewhere to hide. This also means taxonomic isolation: the saola is in a genus of its very own, and we’re still unsure where exactly to place it among its bovine cousins. Now, the saola has been hiding for so long that they now can't survive anywhere else. It’s near-impossible to actually find one in the wild: all the photos we have are from camera traps, not human photographers. The identification of the saola was not the result of an encounter with a live specimen, but from researchers finding their remains deep in the forest. It was years before even a photograph was taken. This avoidance of contact has earned it the moniker “the Asian unicorn.”

Rarity is an inverse value to survival. If something is good at surviving, it isn’t rare. Adaptation in a species can be dangerous, as invasive species demonstrate: think cane toads and rabbits. Animals that struggle to adapt, on the other hand, are lauded as exotic and desirable. Think of pandas, think of giant squid. A niche is ideal until you are forced out of it.

Ecological modelling estimates that there are between 20 and 100 saola currently alive. That’s it. Fewer than the number of students in my year at high school. This is not in itself a problem: there have probably never been many saola. Their range is so limited, and their habitat requires a particular balance of species. As the climate changes, however, and that balance is disrupted, the saola finds itself in a precarious position. The IUCN classifies the saola as critically endangered. We may have arrived just in time to watch it perish.

Two of the Indigenous groups closest to the saola’s habitat are the Tà Ôi and the Katu, who respectively refer to the species as the ngao and the xoong xor. Discovery, especially ecological discovery, is a tricky concept. When we think about knowledge, we tend to think of it as linear and collective: a pan-human endeavour. We discovered fire, and we discovered the wheel, and eventually we discovered the scientific method so we could more efficiently make discoveries. The problem is that that “we” is never as comprehensive as we might like. We didn’t discover fire all at once: countless groups discovered it at roughly the same period, give or take a few thousand years. Technologies developed at different points in history in different places in the world—glass, ceramics, mechanics. Rather than moments, discoveries are a series of communities following similar threads and reaching similar points, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes far apart. When we talk about the “discovery” of animals, we are almost always talking about Western awareness. When the okapi was discovered in 1901, it was only news to those new to Congo: the Indigenous peoples had been perfectly aware of the animal for centuries. The case of the saola is the same. C. Michele Thompson’s 2012 chapter “Would a saola by any other name still be a saola?” quotes Professor Tran Quoc Vuong speaking on this matter in 1993: “Now that they have named it, they will claim it and it may not long survive its discovery!”

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s a chillingly prescient sentiment. No live saola specimen captured by scientists has ever lived for more than a few weeks. They simply fail to thrive in captivity. Since 1992, thirteen saola have met such a fate. If we generously approximate the total saola population to be 60 individuals, that’s around 22% of the population. Relative scale is of the utmost importance when dealing with such a rare species. Only one individual survived long enough to be placed in a zoo, and she died after just eighteen days. Strangely, appropriately, she was named Martha.

Of course, these attempts at captivity were conducted by a particular group of people with a particular type of interest in the saola. The other side of the coin is those who don’t attempt to relocate the saola, but live with them: that is, the local Indigenous populations. For them, 1992 heralded not the discovery of the saola, but of outside interest in a species they had known for generations. The Bronze Age Đông Sơn culture depicted the saola in their artworks thousands of years before the West claimed discovery. Despite this, Indigenous knowledge of the saola was all but ignored during the first decade of Western awareness of the species. It’s barely improved since then. Western attempts to conserve the saola have included instructing nearby Indigenous communities to halt their traditional hunting and agricultural practices. I suppose they have to make up for that 22% somewhere, and it certainly wouldn’t do for Western scientists to take responsibility. They are, after all, the ones who discovered it.

It would be overly simplistic to establish a false dichotomy between Western knowledge and other kinds. The saola was described through collaboration by scientists from south-east Asia and elsewhere, as well as through guidance from relevant Indigenous groups. When I speak of “Western science,” I do not refer to the identities of individual scientists. Rather, it’s about the framework of knowledge and the ideologies that drive it. Knowledge and its mechanics are cultural. Western science is primarily concerned with classification, compartmentalisation, and decontextualisation. Knowledge is abstracted and communicated as abstract concepts. This is not necessarily an incorrect approach, but it is ideological. In contrast, other knowledge systems may focus on the relationship between knowledge and the natural world, or with cultural history. It should be no surprise, then, that Western knowledge mechanics stumble when presented with a species that is rarely seen and impossible to remove from its environmental context. We can’t observe the saola in situ, nor can we contain it. What we can know is limited by our inability to abstract it.

This inability to connect with the saola using our established systems—particularly, those systems standardised by global conservation efforts—creates a problem of object permanence. If we, the West, had never found out about the saola, we could not be moved by its potential extinction. But we do know, and so we feel we must do something. Western intervention with the saola has been fraught from day one, though, and I have little hope that our gaping, limited knowledge system holds the answer to saving it. What could we do for the saola that wouldn’t disrupt things further? What can we do that doesn’t further incentivise imperialism towards rural Indigenous communities? The saola, after all, is not the only one at stake. Just as no one has asked the saola what it wants, no one has asked the Indigenous communities what is best for the species they’ve known for so long. Regardless of good intentions, global conservation has imperialist tendencies: a chauvinistic conviction that only we, the West, know how to manage nature, even when we arrived only moments before. We are determined to be the hero in the story this time, no matter what it takes.

I don’t know what to do for the saola. I’m not a conservationist, I’m a cryptozoologist. I do know that globalist conservation efforts are consistently complicated by geopolitics both new and old. Like discovery, the shape of modern conservation is the result of a thread of events, many of which were profoundly violent. It would be naive to assume that violence has been resolved. I can’t speak to whether the local Indigenous communities are ecologically responsible in their relationship with the saola; I simply don’t know enough. Similarly, we don’t know how well Western conservation attempts will work, though the evidence thus far isn’t especially inspiring. We’ll keep trying, though, until there are no saola left with which to try.

Every species is a universe. The saola evolved over 10 million years ago. A 2025 study by Garcia-Erill et al. modelled population size over millennia and concluded that the effective population size has never exceeded over 5,000 individuals in the last 10,000 years. The saola has always been rare and strange, even before we observed its rarity and strangeness. Now that we know about it, we are compelled to find meaning in it. That’s not the saola’s problem, though. It only becomes the saola’s problem when it begins to influence how we interact with it.

A research summit on the saola was held in Hanoi in 2004. Regretfully, my participation in this event was prevented by the fact that I was seven years old at the time. I knew a lot of animals at that age, but not the saola. The published conference proceedings reveal that the conclusions to most of the discussions was “we don’t know.” We don’t know its breeding behaviours; we don’t know its full diet; we don’t know how it occupies itself when it’s not fleeing from us. Also notable are the reports that local Indigenous populations often refused to cooperate with foreign scientists. They don’t trust their approach to study, nor their depictions of the communities’ long-standing relationship with the saola. And why should they?

The economy of rarity has supported zoos for over a century, though the politics of it have changed considerably in that time. Previously, the hunting and trafficking of exotic animals was what kept zoos afloat. Now, it’s something that all respectable zoos rail against. Their rare animals aren’t poached, but saved. We want to save the saola, too, but the captivity approach emphatically does not work in this case. The saola resists abstraction, and so we’re stuck.

I love the saola so deeply. I can’t help it. Its rarity and uniqueness make it impossibly appealing. An animal so uncommon that it may well not exist, but still it does. Like everyone else, I can’t help projecting onto the saola: poorly understood, rarely observed, and quick to perish when removed from its natural environment. If you really wanted to, you could psychoanalyse my fixation on rarity. I’m more or less three metaphors on repeat underneath a stupid jacket.

There’s so much we don’t and may never know about the saola. Discovery, after all, does not necessarily resolve mystery. We know about the saola, but we don’t understand much at all. This is the appeal of the new species, and of speculative ecology in general. If there is still mystery in the natural world, if we have not entirely categorised it, then there is hope that it may endure. We pray that we might discover a new truth that we haven’t completely destroyed our home. Of course, there is no one, discrete discovery that will prove this, but that doesn’t negate the vision. Climate science tells us that there is hope and there is time for the planet. The obstacle, however, is that the tools we currently use are insufficient. Abstraction will not save us, and so we must accept that Western knowledge alone will not save us. Classifying the saola, poking and prodding it and attempting to know it in our rigid way, will not save it. If we are to let our planet live, we have to let go of how we think we should know it. None of this matters to the saola, of course. As far as I can tell, all the saola wants is to be left alone.