Why White Tigers Should Go Extinct
slate.com
slate.com
I'm trying to understand the moral implications here. The author paints a very heart-touching and grim picture, and it's tempting to agree. But what happens when you apply this to humans?
So, I think there is a hook. It's just a really shitty one. Note that the hook for dogs can backfire as well, if they try to assert pack dominance vs. their owner. So we breed really submissive dogs.
Tigers and lions are very confident apex predators, so they don't really have the vicious instinct or the intense fear response that some animals have. So they don't deliberately attack humans. By contrast, leopards and jaguars will kill you out of sheer viciousness, bears will attack you if they feel threatened, and polar bears will attack you because they are hungry and you are made of meat.
The main danger with tigers and lions is that they don't really understand how fragile humans are, so they might accidentally kill or maim you, which happened to Roy.
Same thing has been done with servals ("savannah cat"); I can only imagine how awesome/terrifying it would be with other lesser wild cats, although I think there are enough differences between the great cats and domestic cats to make it difficult/impossible to do naturally (tiger/cat or leopard/cat cross).
Additionally, humans FREQUENTLY choose to adopt rather than risk passing on a genetic abnormality to a biological child.
The only difference here is that we would be making the decision for the tigers since, as everyone would agree, they don't have the ability to understand the consequences and make the decision themselves.
1.5-2% of children are adopted in the US. About 50% of those children's parents adopted due to infertility, of which an even smaller fraction is voluntary infertility.
I wouldn't say that is something that humans due frequently, and is probably limited to a small set of cultures, and an even smaller subset of parents with both the knowledge and fortitude to make that decision.
I'm an adoptive parent and know several dozen other adoptive families. I have never personally met someone who chose to adopt to avoid the risk of passing on genetic abnormalities.
Unfortunately, I also know some who chose to ignore the advice of their genetic counselor and now have 3 lovely, but severely mentally disabled children (Fragile X run amuck) who will never be able to live independently.
For a more severe and human example, people who have a high likelihood of carrying the recessive Taysach's gene are often tested. If they both are carriers, they adopt, rather than taking a 1-in-4 chance of having a child who will die horribly. If one is a carrier and the other is not, then it's no problem. No one is being sterilized; it's positive, voluntary eugenics and it's a good thing.
Perhaps Dalmatians should be allowed to go extinct.
To what extent can making yourself attractive or "cute" enough to have your existence furthered by another species be considered a successful form of adaptation?
Edit: Shenglong, just saw your response under this post's sibling. The point is not that the author argues for the human-led removal of unnecessary traits. It's that we should not spread misinformation and continue to go out of our way to create those traits. In the specific case of the white tiger, such behavior results in really harmful genetic defects that could result in the extinction of tigers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tiger#Genetic_defects).
http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/american-tiger.html
It covers everything that's in this Slate article, but actually goes to the trouble of getting opinions from experts in the field of conservation, genetics, etc..
Here's one:
There's a lot more out there like this.
In a few decades there probably won't be any.
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/tigers/ab...
I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.
Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.
We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.
I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.
Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.
At current rates, we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I am not fond of making large, random changes to complex systems that affect us.
Interesting assertion. Got a citation for that?
For example if 90% of land is used for farming and cities, why not save the rest 10% for wild animals? The gain from changing that into farmland as well seems minimal, but the loss very large - it can be complete for those species that are destroyed.
I've never understood the very hard line against forest conservation in my country either. If the environmental folks are proposing 5 to 10 percent of forests being put under conservation, is that such a big loss to the economy? For many species that live in old forests there might be only a few habitats left in the country.
What is the ultimate objective, or the meaning of life? Maximizing human biomass? Does that goal justify us to destroy everything else in process? Do tigers really have no value for you whatsoever?
I've seen big cats in the zoo and it seems they have gone mentally insane, repeating same movements etc.
We have brown bears over here. You're lucky to see one as they are really good at avoiding people. I don't think people have problems with them unless they (the people) do something stupid. Mites, wasps, dogs and horses kill much more people every year.
Many of the venues that display white tigers have a long
history of shading the truth about their mutants.
There is no problem with man changing the course of nature. Why not release some white tigers and actually see how they evolve, instead of simply assuming that they won't thrive?
...unless you hold the tiger in your mind in the same way you would your own house cat. But that's warped, because a house cat can't and won't eat you.
I still think the claims of all these problems with captive tigers are overblown. Animals in the wild have plenty of health problems. The difference is that there aren't nearly as many people scrutinizing and treating them.
Never say never:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1922/will-cats-eat-...
French bulldogs have to be almost exclusively birthed by C-section, because their heads are so big, and the females typically need to be inseminated by artificial insemination, because the males have a very hard time mounting females.
But they're very popular and widespread.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahltan_Bear_Dog [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Extinct_dog_breeds
Nothing in this article posits the premises you argue against.
That is not what the author is pointing to at all! Nothing even remotely close to it.
> There is no problem with man changing the course of nature.
Of course not, look at all the dogs we have. Not many have issues with it. But some of the breeds are just bred for humans to go "awww", that we do not consider how many of these breeds have high risk of disease and death.
> Why not release some white tigers and actually see how they evolve, instead of simply assuming that they won't thrive?
There are already 4000 tigers in the wild. The author is not asking for planned execution, but to put an end to the inbreeding programs disguised as "conservation efforts". Also the gene in the wild for thousands of years before humans started breeding them selectively. And that gene did not win out the evolutionary race.
I accept both, and especially the second, but I'm not anti-human or anything. It's just that we have really, really, rocketed past the rest of life on Earth, evolutionarily speaking. We destroy species, entire ecosystems, accidentally with little effort and often without even noticing until after the fact, if we notice at all. We are probably within the next 100-500 years going to reach a point where the existence of other life on Earth is not necessary for our survival. We have already passed the point where we can kill off most of it, perhaps all.
So, I don't know if you could say we have a "responsibility" to other life on Earth (although I tend to think we do), but, if we want to keep it around in anything resembling its current form, we do have to consider ourselves as apart from it in some sense. If we engage the rest of life on Earth as equals, we will likely kill most or all of it off, because there really is no contest.
Is it ethical to ask for donations or ticket prices to zoos by giving people the impression that their money will (partially) go to conservation efforts, while the money is spent to breed animals that cannot survive in the wild but only for "marketing" purposes?