Guest blogger - Josh Skarratts - Animals, humans and extinction

So you like animals, don’t you. Of course you do, who doesn’t? I don’t know a person who dislikes animals. Animals are great, they can help you with companionship, provide hours of entertainment, serve practical uses and just sometimes be fun to look at. This being said, they should be allowed to say goodbye to the world and go extinct, shouldn’t they? Or should we save them like ‘WWF’ wants to? No, we should not save them and here’s why.


First on the list, Pandas. OMG I love Pandas, they look awesome, they are awesome and this. However, we need to let this creature runs its course, if you don’t know much about Pandas, here’s a crash course. This is a type of bear that lives specifically on bamboo, not a very good source of nutrients. These bamboo shoots only grow in a thin band on certain mountains, which means the Pandas live in this thin band on certain mountains. Now this isn’t such a bad thing, some entire species of troglodytes (cave dwelling animals) are reserved to two caves, why? Because this is the correct number for the species to survive. Then we wonder why there are so few of them. Oh yea, they suck at sex too, like, really suck. Suck so much that it makes me feel a whole lot better about myself.

Now, Tigers! Tigers are fucking scary! If you don’t believe me watch this. Now tell me you would be upset to see that go extinct. What’s that? You disagree? Well, let me give you a quick history lesson, in Britain there used to be a variety of predators ranging from bears to wolves. What happened to them? We killed them, killed them all so humans could take over. Do you feel bad? No, because now we can live without fear of being bitten to death (until we create zombies, fuck!). Now imagine you live in an area with Tigers… let that sink in. You live where Tigers live. Holy shit! What do you do?

Here’s a few options. Nothing, this is by far the worst option, I’m not even going to elaborate. Next, build some good defenses, something that a Tiger won’t be able to get past. Hmmm, tigers can do it all man, climb, swim, jump, nothing is stopping your Tiger. If it wants you its gon’ get you! Now another option is to get together a militia and kill those terrifying sons o’ bitches. But that’s not easy either, in the Sundarbans in India Tigers kill 50-250 people a year… What. The fuck! They know how to kill us a hell of a lot better than us killing them. There is one story of a Tiger killing three people in a boat of five! That’s five full grown men, rowing as fast as they can whilst a Tiger hunts them. It swam after them, killed one of them, dragged him to the banks, jumps back in, kills another guy and does this once more before he got bored. And if you think you're safe in a zoo with Tigers, think again. A few years ago some kids in San Francisco were throwing pine cones at the Tiger (Tigers hate pinecones), this tiger thought, ‘fuck you monkey!’, jumped out of his cage… jumped out, just fucking jumped out! And killed one of the kids in a café. Shit.

There have been five mass extinction events, this means this is five times where life on earth has almost completely been wiped out, the last one being the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But at Jeff Goldblum so eloquently put it in ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘life, finds a way’. It certainly does and humans are causing lots of animals to become in danger of going extinct, but is this necessarily a bad thing? Sure there is the guilt we feel for killing a living being, sure there is the guilt of cutting down an entire eco-system. But we’re forgetting something, humans are shit. Without our electricity and tools readily available, how do we survive? We don’t. We die. Once the humans are gone, these cities we live in will soon erode. Ever seen ‘I am legend’? Wouldn’t be much different.

Now, there seems to be a general unspoken agreement that humans aren’t animals and we are somehow disconnected from nature. This notion is ridiculous, ask anyone in America affected by Sandy how disconnected from nature they feel. Let me get this straight, we’re animals, no two ways about it and these cities we live in are bee hives. Albeit a lot more complicated, but natural. Cities are natural for humans otherwise there would only be a few, not thousands and one thing about cities is that we kill or ward off potential risks i.e. Tigers, wolves and bears. So this makes us part of nature, do we stop nature from running its course? No. So should we feel guilty about the things we do? No. We should just do them. Nature/life will carry on regardless.

I’m not saying go out and kill animals, god no. I’m not saying pollute everything, what I am saying is we need to stop thinking we have such a great effect on the planet, sure we’ve affected the climate and sure we’ve killed off a few species, but the planet and life is fine. WE are fucked! The only reason we care about this stuff is because it’s nice to look at and we depend on the system working. If the eco-systems fail, we fail and then we go extinct. Is another species going to save us? Nope, so why should we help other species? Because we can? Because it’s a nice thing to do. Sure, both good answers, but shouldn’t we respect nature and let it takes its course? Well over 95% of all life that has ever lived is extinct, it’s the natural order, some other species will rise to take the place of the last species until the end of time.

The sheer arrogance of mankind astounds me, we try to control nature and that’s what got us into trouble in the first place, interfering with nature, doesn’t anyone understand that? I think we should go one way or the other, take over the planet completely and pool our resources to spreading across the universe or go extinct, but because of the sheer number of us, we’re not going extinct anytime soon… watch out Mars, soon… we’ll fuck up your shit too.

By Josh Skarratts