Hi Bluejay,
But, trade-offs aside, if an animal is clearly doomed (or if we have already killed it off), and there is no way to feasibly return it to the wild, is it morally warranted for us to preserve a few specimens?
For the purpose of education I can see it as possibly being a good, interesting thing, but, to clone it and then exibit it, I would say no. There are plenty of living animals to care for.
Ignoring the fact that we destroyed their habitate, which caused their disappearance, the species is now gone, time to focus on the living. Of course i'm only speaking about species that we've caused to go extinct. If a species naturally went extinct - viewing it from a nonscientific achievement perspective - we should bid farewell to them and study them as we currently do.
what about nature's benefit? Would preserving an otherwise-doomed animal in captivity (perhaps through cloning) be a way to sort of "make it up" to Mother Nature?
I personally think the best way to achieve that is to just not fuck with it. RAZD has said he is a "leave no trace" camper, I am too, the reason being that we fuck with nature when we don't. We are now beyond the ability to leave no trace, unless we just stay out of it in an industrial capacity. This of course will not happen, so forget about "making it up" to mother nature at this point.
It seems that, whatever we do, it will have a major impact on the natural world and its future, which kind of makes it hard to decide what the "right" thing to do is.
I would not say "whatever" we do will make it hard to decide what the right thing to do is. Clearly, not destroying these animals environment for the purpose of industrialization
is the right thing to do. Deciding whether or not to bring an animal back who we've
already caused to die off could only be considered a right or wrong choice when one has ignored the horrific act of having killed them off to begin with. If you have ignored that fact already then we should just do as we please - bring them back to life if you want, or not, it doesn't matter - because it will lend absolutly no moral weight on the issue. Morality left long time ago.
Killing some animals off causes ecological imbalances. Preserving all species may impact ecological succession and alter evolutionary patterns.
I don't think we should try to preserve the species, just not fuck with it's environment. The species will take care of itself; to quote
Rocky 4: If he dies, he dies. But we don't have to expedite that by reducing the species environment which it uses for the benefit of its own survival.
I personally feel that preserving as much wilderness and as many species as we can, even if only by keeping small captive populations, is morally the safest stance we can take, given our options. But, on a purely practical basis, I'm not sure there is a solid justification for this, because it may effect the future just as much as killing things off, and, as Annafan said, there's a slippery slope there that would have to be guarded carefully.
I honestly have no moral issue at this point with either keeping them captive of not, like I said, once we stopped concerning ourselves with the species original existance it doesn't make much moral difference what we do after that point, IMHO.
- Oni
"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks
"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky
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