ENDANGERED SPECIES

words & music by Eric Bogle

1. Life on planet Earth is teeterin' on the brink
Every day more species become extinct
Every day it seems, we lose another link in the chain
Life's not a trailer it's the whole main feature
The outlook's bleak and it's gettin' bleaker
For all those poor endangered creatures who remain.

Chorus:
Forget the platypusses and those funny aardvarks
Pigmy hippopatamusses and great white sharks
I' tellin' you the truth, no bull faeces
If you wannna know the most endangered species
It's not the albatross or the humpback whale
It's the middle-aged ineffectual,
unfashionably heterosexual, white Anglo-Saxon male
The middle-aged unrecontructable, non-tax deductable
white Anglo-Saxon male.

2. Back in the good old days when it took two to breed
We swam around the gene pool scattering our seed
Now IVF and sperm banks have removed the need to serve or volley
We used to be the hunters and providers
Knockin' off mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers
Now your wife shops at Foodland
and you walk beside her with the trolley

CH
Forget the gorillas and the chimpanzees
Those scaly armadillos, sea-grass munchin' manatees
I'm tellin' you the truth, you know that it's real
The next one to fall from evolution's wheel
Is not the green-tree frog or the giant land snail
It's the middle-aged unathletic, flabby and pathetic
white Anglo-Saxon male
The middle-aged inexplicable, daggy and despicable
white Anglo-Saxon male.

3. You ain't worth savin', got no style, no cachet
But if bad taste comes back into fashion one day
They got your germ plasm locked away in some laboratory
Goodbye you dinosaur a brave new world calls
not long now till the curtain falls
You lost the race when you lost your balls - end of story.

CH
Forget the iguanas, and the orang-utans
Those cuddly koalas and the mighty elephants
I'm tellin' you the truth, you know it's no lie
PUt your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye
You got the future of a fart in a force ten gale
You middle-aged introspectual, twice-a-month erectual
white Anglo-Saxon male
You middle-aged unrootaqble, unstable and unsuitable,
white Anglo-Saxon male
Forget about the cheetahs and the giraffes
Those laughin' hyenas, they're not a lot of laughs
Don't worry 'bout the wildebeeste or the kangaroos
Remember that to some at least no gnus can be goo gnus
In the battle for survival someone has to fail
It's the middle-aged undesirable, use use-by-date expirable,
white Anglo-Saxon male
The middle-aged indefensible, obsolete, dispensable,
white Anglo-Saxon male.


rich r