Endangered species – Why man kind is a Destructive force
By Ciara Farrell
I was looking through the endangered species list online last night and it just wouldn’t end, and I do understand that not all of these animals are endangered due to humans but the majority are. The big animals are nearly gone because of us, Lions, Tiger, and Elephants, Bears and whales. It is estimated that there is only 3,200 Tigers left in the wild and only six out of nine subspecies left, and this IS due to humans, hunting them for their claws, fur, and teeth to use as trophies, more sadistically the use of tiger bones, the fat, liver, whiskers, eyes and even the penis are used even now in ‘traditional medicine’ as either medicines, poison’s or as an aphrodisiac but as we all know these things don’t work as medicine’s or anything else for that matter so why have their numbers been cut from an estimated 100,000 in the 1990’s to approximately 3,200 in 2010?
The African Elephant and Lion are still endangered; the Lion population in Africa is down 95% since the 1990’s to about 18,000 – 25,000. Granted their numbers are a lot higher than the tigers but this is still a huge concern. It sickens me to realise that I could go to Africa and pay to hunt lions, and this is legal? It was all over the newspapers during the world cup. What type of sick person would pay to do such a cruel and evil thing, why would anybody want to murder one of these amazing creatures? In some parts it is legal to shoot and kill a lion only four days after being released into the wild from captivity, talk about not even getting a chance at survival. The elephants get hunted for their tusks (ivory). During the 1980’s they were being hunted so much that an estimated 100,000 elephants were killed per year, and by 1989 85% of the elephant population was gone. Now there are approximately 300,000 living in the wild, not nearly enough seeing as in the 1930’s to the 1950’s there was an estimated 3 to 5 million elephants in the wild. And out of this 300,000 less than 20% are under any kind of protection, while poaching elephants has been de-criminalised since 1997 in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia.
The Asiatic black bear, also known as the moon bear has a heart wrenching story, there are about 25,000 left in the wild and are being poached into extinction due to sick sadistic human beliefs. It is believed that the bile found in the gallbladder of these beautiful animals can cure liver cirrhosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, burns, heart disease, and eye infections and they have been hunted for this for over three thousand years. The bile salts, although some what affective it is easily replaced by synthetic substitutes which are cheaper, easier, more readily accessible and more effective. In China, North and south Korea, and Vietnam these creatures are ‘farmed’ for their gallbladders and are kept in tiny confined cages and live extremely painful lives, what is worse is that these bile farms have created the belief that bile from wild bears is much more potent than the farmed stuff so the number of Asiatic black bears in the wild being poached has increased. They are also hunted and killed due to the fact that bear paw and meat is a delicacy in some South East Asian countries.
When a hunter or poacher goes out and kills hundreds of innocent animals a year, nobody bats an eyelid, but when a person goes out and kills only 3 other people they are considered to be serial killers, and evil psychopaths. Poachers and hunters are just as bad, if not worse than serial killers, it is mankind that has caused so many creatures to already become extinct, many amazing things we will never get the chance to see because we have killed them all off. To shoot and kill an animal, or to set dogs on them or capture them in nets, or whatever way they do it these days, it is the height of evil, the poachers get a thrill out of watching these innocent animals fight for their life, the get off watching the life leave their eyes, they enjoy causing un-imaginable pain and fear in the last few moments of the animals life and they get away with it, nobody locks them up for life, nobody calls them serial killers, or considers them to be evil but they are. They love to kill and why is it only considered evil to kill other people, we have no right to exterminate entire species from this planet. For the most part these animals don’t cause us any harm or threaten us in any way, so why do we murder them? Why use their body parts as weird medicines that don’t work, what type of sick individual wants to be responsible for the murder of a tiger, not only the murder but sometimes they are skinned alive before they die so they inflict enormous amounts of suffering, just so they can have a fluffy rug? I believe that these people are cruel, evil and sadistic, they don’t deserve life. And the sad thing is nobody cares, this is why I think man kind it the most evil of creatures, no other species has been responsible for all the habitat loss and all the animals that are already extinct and all the animals which are nearly gone, I don’t think people realise that once these animals are gone there is no getting them back.
It seems that we like to kill of the predators, the creatures at the top of the food chain, but what we don’t seem to care about is the devastation that will be caused to the ecosystems they live in once they are gone.
The endangered species list is endless, the ones that jumped out at me were, the African elephant and lion, the agile gibbon, the American bison, Asian elephants and leopards, Asiatic black bears, brown bears, the Atlantic humpbacked dolphin, the Australian sub fin dolphin, the Chilean dolphin, the bow headed whale, black rhino’s, cheetah’s and orang-utans, and I didn’t even make it passed the letter C before I had to look away.
We need to raise awareness to stop this; our children and grand-children will probably never even hear of or see any of these creatures if we don’t start to do something about it soon.
