Epatoys : Why should humans protect wild animals ???

Why should humans protect wild animals ???

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Why should humans protect wild animals ???

This question is interesting in that it is particularly complicated in certain ways.  

There are two reasons to protect wild animals, one has to do with balance in our ecology.  All of the things you see out in the wild evolved to work together to have a biosphere that sustains life.  Think about something that is a complex system of moving parts that works together like a car.  A few things can go wrong with your car and there will be little to no impact on how it runs and gets you from place to place, but at some point you can get to a moment when there are enough problems that a failure is inevitable.  We know that things do not work when there are too many similar organisms in the same place (such as in a monoculture where many of the same plant are grown).  This opens up the dominant organisms to sudden failure because of several problems, but specifically a lack of diversity (and thus having common weaknesses).  While I could spend a lot of time explaining how a diverse biosphere is important, let's just say that it is.  That information is readily available all over the internet, so I feel pretty confident that you can find it pretty easily.

The second of these reasons is more philosophical in nature.  As the most intelligent organisms on this planet (that we know about), do we have a responsibility to preserve at least some fraction of what brought us to where we are today?  Human beings have figured out the importance of knowing and preserving history, and as nature and the wild are part of our natural history, some feel that preservation of living specimens in situ, especially when there are still so many mysteries out there for us to discover.  To a degree, you are also looking at respect, and why the world and those of us who are a part of the ecosystem of the world (read: everyone and everything that is alive currently) needs to have a certain level of appreciation for the other organisms that make our biosphere work.

The third reason is what is sometimes referred to as the law of unintended consequences.  Sometimes it is hard to know exactly how to model what might happen to an ecosystem when even the smallest contributor to that ecosystem is removed.  Right now we are playing a very dangerous game of Jenga where we assure ourselves that because the tower has never fallen due to the removal of another piece, that it will never fall.  That luck will only carry us so far and in time we may look back and see that what we have been doing is more hubris than careful care of the only operating biosphere that currently supports human life in the quantity that we have chosen to support.