[quote=@mdk]
<Snipped quote by POOHEAD189>

I remember when that happened. BBC was following that herd for one of their Planet Earth series, don't remember which variant (or if it made the cut, I mean, that's sad shit).

It's absolute horseshit to link that to climate change. Genetic diversity in a global population of 600k is very homogenized (am I using that word right? It's an inbred species). They're vulnerable to pathogens and they caught one. Shit happens. To their credit, the real actual scientists who were on the scene said as much at the time. Apparently, now, someone's throwing that whole mass-death onto the altar of climate change, and [i]the people who are pulling that BS are the reason why I'm skeptical of every climate-change headline ever.[/i] Because they're lying. 
[/quote]

That is literally not what the article says, and the article does not have a political agenda I do not believe. It was a harmless bacteria that is common to the animal, and the humidity caused the bacteria that is usually in their respiratory tract to get into their bloodstream where it did not belong. 

And while I did not get a degree in zoology, I wanted to and was going to if my university had such a degree, but it's been a fancy of mine since I was a wee lad and I can safely say that plenty of species have come back from the brink of a thousand animals and did not have any debilitating inbreeding, such as the American Bison. It only caused some small problems and was mostly a worry. But there are many well known animals on earth that have a population of 10-20,000 and inbreeding is not an immediate threat. 600,000 is quite a large number for a megafauna.  

Edit: Though a quick search does show me that the Saiga are noted to not have a lot of genetic diversity due to a population bottleneck in the Pliestocene, which kinda leads me to believe that maybe it is a factor of both.