Poignant Portraits Of Endangered Animals

It's hard for some people to understand the value of an animal's life until they come face to face with that animal, because the animals they encounter in the human world are either pets or pests.

Because of this detachment from nature many humans have a hard time caring about the fact that certain animal species are endangered or going extinct, like the Shoebill (only 5-8,000 in the wild) and the Saiga (critically endangered) above.

And look at how handsome this Iberian Lynx is, can you believe there are only 326 of them left in the wild?

British photographer Tim Flach felt seeing a portrait of these disappearing species might be just the thing to make people care, so he spent two years taking perfectly poignant portraits of the world's endangered species.

Look these Ring-Tailed Lemurs (pop. 2000 as of 2017) in the eyes and tell them you don't care if they live or die or disappear from the planet entirely. Go on, I'll wait...

Couldn't do it, could ya?! Check out the rest of Tim's series Endangered at his site and you'll see dozens more reasons to care about the plight of endangered animals like these poor White-Bellied Pangolins, current population unknown.

See Photographer Spends Years Taking Photos Of Endangered Animals, They're Heartbreakingly Beautiful here