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?
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.
...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-...
Nothing in this article posits the premises you argue against.
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
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.