Pets Are Contributing to the Greatest Environmental Crisis Facing Global Ecosystems - Independent Media Institute - link
AUTHOR:: [[Peter Christie]] who wrote Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction
►Excerpts directly from the article except for those with my comments : #ff hashtag and emphasis mine.
AND THE QUESTION WE SHOULD CONSIDER IS: can we both love our pets within our walls as surrogates for all of the four-legged beasts of the world in peril AND extend our reach to protect them all, not just the ones in our laps? #ff
By 1900, we weighed one-third more than wild mammals, and by the end of the following century—after the total weight of mammalian wildlife plummeted by half and the mass of people quadrupled—we became 10 times more abundant (by weight). Now, 7.7 billion of us dwell on this busy planet, and by midcentury, the number could be more like 10 billion. We have arrived at a point at which we absolutely dwarf the wild world. Like the proverbial bull in a china shop, we can scarcely move without breaking something.
Between 1993 and 2009 alone, the total wilderness flattened to build new farms, towns, and mines around the world equaled an area larger than India.
our changes to the global landscape—for agriculture and development—amount to the single greatest threat to life’s diversity in millions of years.
#ff The author does not mention the vast amount of meat and grain that must go into the tons of yearly food allotment for all pet cats and dogs. Goldfish, not so much.
A fifth of the world’s land surface is expected to see large-scale shifts in climate by the end of the century. #ff much of that is in the “breadbasket” portions of temperate continents. A good bit of that shift is not the climate’s fault but ours, as we clear carbon-storing forests for shopping centers, interstates, office parks, and monoculture crops.
People, after all, will be people. And people—the growing billions of us—will keep pets.
The author speaks of the role that E. O. Wilson’s hopes for biophilia may be working against the wild animals we would love if we were not living mostly in cities before long and had not wiped out so much of the wildlife our parents (much less our grandparents) commonly saw and knew and enjoyed. #ff
Our hardwired wonder for other beings was supposed to add delicacy to the way we manage our shared planet. Instead, biophilia may have found another outlet: pets.
We may finally be acknowledging our genetic need for and attachment to animals—as Wilson wished—but not in the wild; we’ve brought them into our homes instead.
For the growing majority—among our swelling numbers in cities around the world—dogs, cats, and other pets are our chief experience and familiarity with animals
Increasingly, we seem to prefer having animals in our lives to visiting them in theirs.
In myriad ways, pets pose a clear threat to the wonderful, wild splendor of the rest of life on earth:
cats and dogs stalk wildlife as human-subsidized killers; jungles are robbed of animals to satisfy the pet trade;
diseases deadly to wild creatures are spread by globe-trotting pets
released pets in nonnative habitats (such as pythons in the Everglades) eat every wild animal in sight or squeeze them out as indomitable competitors;
the pet food business, with its insatiable demand, drains our oceans of vital forage fish.
Over the past five centuries, pets have been among the leading culprits in clobbering literally hundreds of species of threatened and extinct birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians around the globe.
Domestic cats alone have helped obliterate more than 60 species in that period—including the Stephens Island wren of New Zealand and the Hawaiian crow. (Dogs get credit for the extinction of 11 species, thinking maybe on island populations. #ff)
Our biophilia has become fraught. Our love of pets is contributing to what is arguably the greatest environmental crisis faced by global ecosystems.
By this “greatest environmental crisis” he speaks of the “6th Mass Extinction event, whose greater contributors are deforestation and climate chaos consequences. #ff