Should crimes against animals have the same punishment?

4 Comments

The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.
These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year.
If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet - then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true - that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet - then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year.
Experts actually call this natural extinction rate the background extinction rate. This simply means the rate of species extinctions that would occur if we humans were not around.
Between 1.4 and 1.8 million species have already been scientifically identified.

Ok now to the point of my thread and my questions. Every year I hear about poachers, fishing industriess, and other man run operations killing species that are endangered. There are stiff penalties but to me not stiff enough. I mean we will never get these creatures back unless genetics to clone them improve and that in itself is a touchy subject in the science communities and political circles.

Should crimes against endangered animals be as severe as crimes against ... say like other people ? 

yes 23
no 11
they should be worse 2
who cares 5
other 6
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Comments ( 4 )
  • Aroura77
    8 years ago

    We're not causing an anywhere near appreciable effect on the rate of extinction of all the species on this planet. It's ludicrous to assume that because maybe 10,000 humans poach that this is the soul cause of extinction in most species. For example, panda bears are becoming extinct because their natural diet has changed from carnivorous to solely bamboo, which means that they have to spend all day every day eating, can no longer hibernate, and no longer have the expendable time to find mates, but because they're cute, humans have decided to actively bread them, when if they were naturally left in the wild, they would probably become extinct anyway.
    In fact, the worst things humans do to kill species is eat meat, cause they clear a lot of forestry to access the fertile soil underneath in order to grow crops on it that feed cattle, and really it'll have a far greater effect on the animal population if people ate less meat or stopped eating it altogether and just ate crops instead of eating animals that require a lot more crops to produce, than if we punished people who poach more :P

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  • Aroura77
    8 years ago

    you know, loads of new species are evolving all the time, so to say 0.01-0.1% of species are becoming extinct each year is misleading when you have no information on just how many new ones are evolving. (And it's more than you'd think, because most of the species becoming extinct are insects, which make up the majority of all animals on earth, by a LONG way), and with so many species of insect, and the fact that they produce thousands of offspring per mating pair, so it's a much faster process of evolution for insects than it is for large mammals like us, who only produce around 3-7 offspring in their lifetimes. :)

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  • westoptic
    8 years ago

    Animals are more important to this planet than people are. We definitely need stiffer penalties for animal abuse, cruelty and destruction of their habitats. If you remove humans from an ecosystem it will thrive. If you remove a mosquito from an ecosystem it will collapse. Kind of puts the world into perspective.

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  • stopandthink
    9 years ago

    Nah mate. Sure, poachers are assholes, but you can't compare and animal to a human.
    Call me the day bees stop flying into windows, animals become conscious, and say, monkeys stop living primitive lives and give genuine value to their existence unlike simply surviving, eating, reproducing.

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