Extinct Animals

[mkwensky]

Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto

Well, for one thing, most of us don't like it when we send the kid out for a day at the local playground and he winds up getting eaten by a pride of lions.


There's in excess of 2 million species of flora/fauna in existence today that we know about. In the last 400 yrs, there have only been 200 species of large animals that have gone extinct, most of those not due to us. (So much for "The Sixth Great Extinction")


Just as it is the destiny of the individual to die, it is the destiny of species to go extinct. No use crying about it.


OTOH- the biggest influence humans have on the process is that of destroying habitat. Take the Indian Tiger-- it has been extirpated (local extinction) from large swaths of its former natural range on the Indian subcontinent and it's only a matter of time before there are too few left to continue successfully mating for population maintenance. It's not that hunters have murdered them, but that loss of habitat has limited their range & food supply.


There must be a balance between human needs and Mother Nature.


But who are we, whose forefathers have already eliminated wolves & bears from our neighborhoods and buffalo herds from our cropland so that we might live in safety, to tell the more primitive people of Africa & India that they can't do the same for themselves?


I may be smart enough to see the problem, but not wise enough to come up with the answer.

There are few species of megafauna to begin with, so 200 species represent a large chunk. I also question your definition of 'not due to us'. Habitat loss, climate change and introduction of exotic organisms count as human activity.

We all get that a balance need to be struck, but does humanity NEED to take everything? Commander's Island for example where Steller's Sea Cow once lived isn't even inhabited today. Whalers didn't need to stop there to hunt them - there were other food sources, but they chose to because by all accounts their meat taste better than seals. We aren't really better than those sailors as we do something similar in our lives today, like feeling we NEED to eat meat every day. I know that it's impossible for most people to think through every decision they make and it's probably not fair to, but I don't think there's any good excuse for not even managing low hanging fruits like saving giraffes/elephants and lowering ship speeds in whale or manatee habitats. There's also a number of projects in the works for mining the ocean which no one is talking about but will certainly push some of the marine habitats already stressed by overfishing to the breaking point.

[Milky Way Resident]

Originally Posted by mkwensky

There are few species of megafauna to begin with, so 200 species represent a large chunk. I also question your definition of 'not due to us'. Habitat loss, climate change and introduction of exotic organisms count as human activity.

We all get that a balance need to be struck, but does humanity NEED to take everything? Commander's Island for example where Steller's Sea Cow once lived isn't even inhabited today. Whalers didn't need to stop there to hunt them - there were other food sources, but they chose to because by all accounts their meat taste better than seals. We aren't really better than those sailors as we do something similar in our lives today, like feeling we NEED to eat meat every day. I know that it's impossible for most people to think through every decision they make and it's probably not fair to, but I don't think there's any good excuse for not even managing low hanging fruits like saving giraffes/elephants and lowering ship speeds in whale or manatee habitats. There's also a number of projects in the works for mining the ocean which no one is talking about but will certainly push some of the marine habitats already stressed by overfishing to the breaking point.

That's a good point you bring up. It's also worth noting that in the case of many regional species such as Steller's Sea Cow or the dodo, the impact wasn't realized until it was too late. Those species were already on a decline and we delivered the final blow without understanding that there weren't any left. The dodo was not recognized as extinct until the 19th century, despite it having disappeared in the 17th.