Harmful Effects Of Animal Extinction

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The extinction of animals and living organisms is something most humans do not put into perspective, possibly until it’s almost too late. For example, humans don 't realise that their everyday lives are build around these creatures; what we eat, how we breathe, and how our world develops. I myself never thought about a world without whales, manta rays, tigers, plankton and owls and how important they are in my life until I came across the documentary Racing Extinction and the book Sustaining Life.... This new documentary shows examples of the harmful effects that humans cause on the world. Things like climate change, black market sales and the vanishment of animals, has sent the 220 countries the documentary aired in, in an uproar. Although …show more content…
Tischauser states, “The deaths of entire species grew more frequent in the 1900s. One example is this loss of the passenger pigeon, a bird so numerous in the 1820s that flocks numbered in the hundreds of millions, was completely killed off by 1917, all because they supposedly tasted delicious” (Tischauser, Leslie). The same fate almost befell the buffalo. “In the 1860s, the bison numbered more than one hundred million, but by 1890 fewer than one thousand bisons had survived. Native Americans hunted the bison, eating their flesh and using the skins for clothing and shelter, but they killed only what they needed. The settlers, however, saw the bison as a problem that needed to be solved. Huge herds of bison crossed railroad tracks, forcing passenger trains to stop, and the animals interfered with farming, knocking down fences and trampling grain fields. Railroad companies and the US Army sent out hunting parties to get rid of the bison. The extermination ended only after action was taken by Canada.” More commonly today, the “need” and desire for the fashion statement of fur coats has brought death of nearly all jaguars, snow leopards, and various species of fur seals. For example “the Pribilof Island fur seals were hunted nearly into extinction in the late 1800s. The only thing stopping against the hunt was a treaty between the United States, Canada, and Russia established limits on killing the species in its remote northern Pacific island habitat, but even then thousands of seals have been slaughtered despite international

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