[YaxelPerez]

"We can't preserve species over millions of years, so we might as well make them go extinct now" is not a good argument. It's like saying "we can't stop people from dying eventually, so it doesn't matter if I murder someone".

Even if you don't care much for animals, which is fine, you should still be worried about preserving biodiversity. We don't fully understand all the systems at play in an ecosystem, and killing some "useless" possum can have cascading effects that humans won't find favorable in the long run.

You can put a mine somewhere else, but you can't bring an extinct animal back to life.

[true_religion]

Europe's lack of biodiversity comparative to other continents hasn't caused an ecological collapse yet. Ecosystems are not that fragile, multiple species occupy the same niche and are only termed different because we human beings have decided to call them so.

For instance, a tiny difference in a stripe pattern and breeding zones is enough for us to call two different groups of voles, a difference in species. Yet, all the wildly varied dogs in the world are still considered one species.

Are we really losing genetic diversity when one vole species becomes extinct? Perhaps, the difference is merely incidental, and the genes for the different stripe pattern are contained in all vole sub-groups, and they are truly a single species.

[rickycook]

huskies aren’t going extinct any time soon, and we do have plenty of biodiversity issues with dogs. inbreeding of terriers and such for dog shows is a huge problem that has pretty much destroyed entire breeds, and many people are working to fix it

[granshaw]

This is one of the big reasons to me. It’s similar to the mass use of GMOs argument, in that in toying with nature, we don’t fully understand or know what consequences there might be, some of which might not show up until a generation later

[another-one-off]

That is mischaracterising what I said in a very specific way.

Humans are different from animals - not in some intrinsic way, but because you and I are humans and our success is more important than some animal's success.

I'm saying that letting species go extinct is critically different from "we can't stop people from dying eventually, so it doesn't matter if I murder someone" because no humans are involved. That is the distinction that I am comfortable with.

If a human is inconveniencing progress, then they should be treated with respect and dignity. If an animal is inconveniencing progress, it's wellbeing isn't especially important.

[nrb]

> our success is more important than some animal's success.

Why?