Its true, and maybe irrelevant. There is no place for tigers on a settled planet. We have many uses for land, and letting fabulously dangerous carnivores randomly wander huge tracts is one of the less important ones.
I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.
Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.
We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.
I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.
Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.
There has been a number of mass extinction events in world history, the most well known being the extinction of the dinosaurs. That much impact on an ecosystem all at once had massive, unpredictable effects.
At current rates, we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I am not fond of making large, random changes to complex systems that affect us.
We get into value questions really quickly. It is hard to spell them out explicitly.
For example if 90% of land is used for farming and cities, why not save the rest 10% for wild animals? The gain from changing that into farmland as well seems minimal, but the loss very large - it can be complete for those species that are destroyed.
I've never understood the very hard line against forest conservation in my country either. If the environmental folks are proposing 5 to 10 percent of forests being put under conservation, is that such a big loss to the economy? For many species that live in old forests there might be only a few habitats left in the country.
What is the ultimate objective, or the meaning of life? Maximizing human biomass? Does that goal justify us to destroy everything else in process? Do tigers really have no value for you whatsoever?
I've seen big cats in the zoo and it seems they have gone mentally insane, repeating same movements etc.
We have brown bears over here. You're lucky to see one as they are really good at avoiding people. I don't think people have problems with them unless they (the people) do something stupid. Mites, wasps, dogs and horses kill much more people every year.
I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.
Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.
We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.
I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.
Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.