The Yangtze Finless Porpoise is one of the strangest, rarest, most quietly magical animals on Earth and one of the most endangered. It is the only known freshwater porpoise in the world, living exclusively in China’s Yangtze River, a waterway that has basically been turned into a liquid industrial estate. Somehow, against all odds, it is still here.
The Yangtze Finless Porpoise is a small toothed whale in the porpoise family. It has no dorsal fin, which is where the name finless comes from, but it still has pectoral fins and a tail fluke. Along its back is a low ridge covered in tiny bumps called tubercles, which help it navigate shallow, cluttered river environments. Its face often looks like it is gently smiling, which feels either comforting or deeply ironic given the world it is forced to survive in.
It is critically endangered, with only around thirteen hundred individuals left. Not because it is bad at being a porpoise, but because humans are excellent at being destructive. Heavy boat traffic, underwater noise, fishing nets, pollution, dams, sand mining, and the general human hobby of treating rivers like drains have pushed this animal to the edge.
Meanwhile…
What are your favorite sports to watch and play?
I do not have time to waste watching grown adults chase balls while ecosystems collapse quietly in the background. My free time is for art, not yelling at a screen like it owes me money.
That said, when my mum was alive, I played golf with her. That mattered not because of the sport, but because of the time. I take my kids to karate, which technically counts as watching sport, but really it is about confidence, fun and discipline, not about trophies and sponsorship deals.
But the whole spectacle of sport, the obsession, the pedestal it sits on, has always felt off to me. Like a shiny distraction designed to keep people busy while the world burns in the background.
Governments and corporations pour massive money into sport. Stadiums get built with public money. Athletes get scholarships, sponsorships, grants, development programs, and wall to wall media coverage. Entire school systems are built around sport pathways. Corporations use sport as a dopamine delivery system bright lights, loud crowds, tribal loyalty, instant emotional payoff.
Meanwhile, the arts are told to make do. Art programs get cut first. Grants are microscopic and hyper competitive. Creators are told to do it for exposure, which is a fascinating currency because you cannot buy groceries with it.
One elite athlete can earn more in a season than most artists will in a lifetime, while the artist is quietly shaping culture, challenging systems, raising awareness, and creating the stories future generations will live inside.
Sport entertains. Art questions. Sport distracts. Art disrupts. Sport keeps people comfortably numb. Art wakes them up, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes at three in the morning when you did not ask for an existential crisis but got one anyway.
The Yangtze Finless Porpoise is not just an unusual animal. It is a living symbol of what happens when profit, industry, and spectacle outweigh care, imagination, and long term thinking. It is what happens when rivers become highways and factories, when nature becomes inconvenient, when art becomes non essential.
Which is exactly why this artwork exists.
Not to decorate a wall, but to quietly say there are things worth protecting that do not come with a scoreboard.
I have always had this nagging discomfort with sport not because of movement, play, or skill, but because of the system around it. The way it is elevated. The way it swallows resources. The way it keeps people busy while the real stories go untold.
Artists do not distract society. We reflect it. We challenge it. We rewrite it.
And sometimes we draw a small, smiling river porpoise clinging to survival in a toxic river and say this matters.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 