The Long Road

I’m currently reading through A Gap in Nature, a book cataloguing some of the animals that have become extinct since 1500 due to human interference. It’s a sad book, full of island birds and rodents which too often died out due to the introduction of rats and cats. A particularly depressing story is that of the Stephens Island Wren, whose already small population was totally wiped out by one single cat. A lot of the extinctions can also sadly be linked to “collectors” or scientists who needed “specimens”, so they’d kill the animals to bring them home to study. What they didn’t realize is that they might have been killing some of the last surviving members of that species, or if they did realize it, owning the last survivor was even more important to them. Most incredulous of all, is that humans were (and still are) capable of hunting entire species to extinction. The story of Stellar’s Seacow is heartbreaking. These were animals which were observed to have intelligence and emotional attachment to their mates; they were all slaughtered by a dozen men for food.

I’m of 2 minds about the vast swath of extinctions we’ve caused since coming down from the trees. The first is, of course, that we’re a self-centered, irresponsible, brutish species. We don’t care about anything that’s not human. No one ever thought “if I eat all the mammoths in the world, what will I eat tomorrow?”, instead the line of thought probably runs a little more along the lines of “there’re only 10 mammoths left in the world, I better get to them before others do.” As the top of the food chain and the only sentient species around, it’s up to us to keep the balance and to make sure that we’re not destroying what God has spent days intelligently designing.

The second opinion runs somewhat like this: “So?”. Many of the non-sentimental arguments for biodiversity are anthropocentric, anyways. The rain forests provide us with oxygen! We could find a cure for aids in some unknown species! Bison meat tastes good! When we kill off a species, we’re the only ones who know it, the only ones who’ll mourn them and who’ll feel regret about it. The animals don’t care, they don’t know how to. Extinctions are also doubtlessly unavoidable growing pains. Our cave-ancestors didn’t know they were eating the last mammoths just as whalers thought the oceans had an inexhaustible supply of whales. And one can hardly fault someone from a third world country for killing an endangered animal when he has his family to feed. What ultimate goal does the giraffe serve to human development anyways? It will have no purpose at all once we all live on Coruscant.

Replies: 27 comments

Seems like your site will go extinct with such infrequent postings and spam attacks...:P.

As for endangered animals, humans have to learn to care about their neighbours first before realizing how to show compassion for other species. If its any consolation, the extinction of one species opens up the possibility for new species to develop.

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