“Sadly, for the Guardian, the IUCN and the Zoological Society of London, the threat to the ‘critically endangered’ Canarian lizards comes not from ‘Climate Change’ or ‘Habitat Destruction’ but from that most-feared of all predators, ‘Felis catus’.”
“Sadly, for the Guardian, the IUCN and the Zoological Society of London, the threat to the ‘critically endangered’ Canarian lizards comes not from ‘Climate Change’ or ‘Habitat Destruction’ but from that most-feared of all predators, ‘Felis catus’.”
Mr. Delingpole should be cautious about giving the nanny-staters another reason to try to eliminate household pets. Those folks have too many bad ideas as it is.
As for extinction: I’m not an advocate of extinction but many species went extinct before there were humans. Humans may play a marginal role in some extinctions and we’ve played a primary role in a few. The small population of dodoes meant that they were vulnerable to extinction with or without humans; the reduction of great whales and the loss of the passenger pigeon are probably mostly due to human predation. But many creatures are on a path to extinction regardless of human intervention — pandas come immediately to mind, since they have the digestion of a predator and the hunting skills of a grazer, plus they reproduce slowly and parent poorly.