Sunday, April 3, 2016

Unnatural Kingdom
The New York Times article "The Unnatural Kingdom" by Daniel Duane goes into great detail about the ways that humans have used technology to help save endangeres species. The startegies for increasing the population of endangered species include a lot of trapping and relocating, but the main tactics include predation prevention and animal relocation.
Within predation prevention, scientists use several mediums of technology to watch over endangered species in the wild to see just how much the species is killed due to the natural habits of predators that prey on a species. If a predator is killing off too many members of a species, humans will hunt and kill some of the predators to lessen this threat to the endangered species.
Animal relocation includes the movement of some animals within an endangered species to a different area in which they will be predicted to thrive in. In the article, an example of this inlcudes the harsh reloaction of 5 pregnant female sheep to an area with a low population of sheep. The female sheep were captured from their native home in nets and transported by hanging from a helicopter to a whole new environment, in which they gave birth in, adding to the threatened population.
In my opinion humans just need to stop messing with the natural world- I think these methods of saving endangered species originate clearly from guilt, and selfishness. If the bears in Italy didn't start to eat farm chickens, tear up commercial beehives, and intervene with humans, the introduction of collars and sensors would not be made.  But since I have to pick which method I think has a greater chance of success, I would say animal relocation. I say this because within predation prevention, the only threat against endangered species that is payed atention to is predators, but really there are other factors that decrease a population such as disease and habitat destruction. Plus predation prevention is just purely hypocritical; how does it make sense to kill off members of a species in order to save another one? Especially when the predatorial species isnt neccesarily doing anything wrong...since when is it so bad to eat your favorite food? In the case that population numbers of an endangered species are steadily dropping because they are all being eaten by a more fit species, use animal relocation! Provide a better suited envirnoment for an endangered species to thrive in.
Restored populations of big horn sheep will have less genetic diversity than they did 200 years ago because the present population of sheep have been made by the same small species of sheep, creating a low gene pool.
The restored populations should still be considered wild because they aren't domesticated, and they still live in the wild.