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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

These animals are considered "Least Concern"[0]. They are nuisances in many parts of North America[1], and nothing can be done to control their populations because they are the national bird of the United States.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_eagle

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/explore-...

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You could effectively replace animals or bald eagles with humans in your sentiment without any reduction of truth. Does the implied feeling remain?

Empathy is required when dealing with animals that are learning, in various ways, how to survive in the world that we have reshaped for them. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of the ways are not purely symbiotic.

An argument about empathy isn't particularly powerful, unless the receiver already shares your intuitions. It appeals to people who already agree with you.

We don't want to lose bio-diversity. We don't have a way to un-extinct a species yet, so we need to be very careful until there's an undo button. Eagles play an important role in their ecosystem, and it would be bad for us if they went extinct.

We also don't want people to be attacked by animals, especially when they would be skirting legal trouble for reasonably defending themselves against those animals. An individual human does more for you and I than an individual eagle, and the value judgement there is quite clear.

There's an optimal amount of eagles, taking into account all the concerns about ecosystem health, and the well being of people. For this particular species of eagle, at this particular point in time, we are probably wrong in the direction of too-many-eagles, than in the direction of too-few-eagles.

These are good points, but I think it highlights the larger issue in how humans meddle with nature and attempt to be its curator. We'll rarely get it right because nature is a system we don't understand, and we harmed it indiscriminately and then have tried to retrofit nature on top of our constructions.

yeah, that's probably why people are shooting them off power lines.

Why are they a nuisance? The only thing I can think of is that they might hunt someone’s backyard chickens. Otherwise they control rodent, rabbit and snake populations and mostly really just eat a lot of fish.

https://story.californiasunday.com/dirty-birds

Reading this makes it sound like that, since almost nobody lives there half the year, the eagles think its a place to call home. This island is so remote it should almost just be left to the wild.

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