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Why trying to keep a self-destructive species alive?

Swedishguy

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Their natural habitat are a few mountains in China, they eat bamboo and craps much of it out, they only mate with each other on a special day; if you keep them close together on the wrong day they will get discomforted. I am of course talking about Giant Pandas! The only imaginable reason we would keep endangered animals alive is if they are crucial to the ecosystem. Do you really think these lumps of fat are that?
 
Why trying to keep a self-destructive species alive?
Because when theyre gone, the hand of the Craftsman goes with them, and the lore is lost?

Deja vu... [/another glass of water is placed on the desk]
 
They are not self destructive. They've been doing fine till humans came along. It's humans fault they face extinction. Why is our species sodestructive? Argurbly given we are causing global warming we are the most self destructive of all.

I believe in keeping species alive because it's time to remedy some of the destruction we cause.
 
They are not self destructive. They've been doing fine till humans came along. It's humans fault they face extinction. Why is our species sodestructive? Argurbly given we are causing global warming we are the most self destructive of all.

I believe in keeping species alive because it's time to remedy some of the destruction we cause.
^^ There's the answer. So some people can feel good.
 
Can someone explain to me why one example below is good and normal and just 'nature' and the other is 'evil humans ruining things'?

Example 1: Pre-human recorded history. A region of the earth has a balance of one top level predator and a host of prey. It usually works out okay as far as food abundance goes. Cue predator #2, who has slowly been expanding its territory and migrating into the region where there previously existed only predator #1. Now predator #2 is squeezing out predator #1. After a few hundred years, predator #1 goes extinct and predator #2 takes over as the top dog on the food chain.

Example 2: Replace predator #2 above with human migrants. If you want a specific example, I suppose you can think of the migration to North America and the subsequent extinction of Smilodon and other big animals.

I am not saying we should whack all the pandas, but if it is inevitable that they go extinct (at least in the wild), isn't that just nature taking its course if we humans are just naturally taking over their environment?
 
VRW, humans are ruining things because humans are like lemmings with guns and toxic waste, who somehow never get around to jumping off the cliff.
 
Why trying to keep a self-destructive species alive?
Because it makes for quite ridiculous news stories, such as this.
 
Well, they are highly specialised. They have shouldered into a very narrow niche in the eco-system. Humans are destroying it.

Applying some kind of social darwinian notion to the situation tends to end up meaning there should only be humans eating rats and cockroaches around, unless the roaches and the rats make a meal out of humanity first.

Kind of boring...

You could as well go after the gorillas. Now there's one evolutionarily useless species managing to carve out virtually bugger all in the form of an ecological niche. Same goes for the chimpanzees and the orangutans, to a somewhat lesser extent.

Or the koalas. A species so specialised on eating eucalyptus leaves, which contains almost nothing one can derive nutrition from, that they spend their lives drugged, and are unable to develop even a neurological system on par with other mammals. Little energy, tiny brains. They're furry, cute, and crudely put together.

Anyway, your logic seems to head in the direction that if a species of animal, or plant for that matter I suppose, turns out to be unable to take whatever humanity happens to throw at it, it should be written off as a "looser", and we can move on to destroying the next species?

The real problem isn't just that species are going extinct. That's more like a symptom. The real problem is that we are turning a world of infinately complex biotopes, where these species made a living, into some kind of monoculture.

Well, rats and roaches it is then, in the end.:p
 
Survival of the fittest, azzaman, survival of the fittest.
Thats an out dated philisophy. If it were realy survival of the fittest we wouldn't have hospitals or old peoples homes or anything remotely geared towards caring for others.
 
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