How well do you think humans are doing as a species?

[Helel]

I don't buy the whole "animals live in harmony with their environment" bit. Animals can and do act as greedy and selfish as they can. Given the chance, animals can and do overconsume their food sources until depletion, and even the most strongly social animals are still hostile to those outside of their own social group, fighting and sometimes killing each other.

And from that, humans develop food production to increase the amount of food we have available, and to not kill off unnecessary animals off (as has been done in various cases in our history, but farming and such has limited this trend because of us domesticating various species for our own uses).

Regardless, I disagree on the note of having no natural defenses. Mainly, it's because of our "higher" intelligence over any other being on the planet, and the ability to develop methods to outwit other creatures in order to hunt them, or to just avoid them.

If you'd like to pursue this subject Fae, I highly recommend a book called "Guns, Germs, and Steel" which is where I'm drawing a lot of my ideas for this discussion from on how humans have developed in certain ways over the last 13,000 years.

[Mitera Nikkou]

I'm not much of a book reader, though. ^_^; Haven't been for a while.

As for farming and domestication, that's mostly for our own benefit, not other animals and the environment in general. The more land we take for our food, the less food that there is for other creatures in that area. Which falls under human overpopulation. And we do destroy habitats for this land where we grow our food. And I can't say much for domestication, other than that I know humans wouldn't like it if they were captured, forced into captivity, made to reproduce and have no chance of avoiding slaughter. Seen it in some movies, y'know. Humans just don't like that kind of stuff. If the animals that go through this had a mind like ours, I'm sure that they wouldn't like it either.

And I never said that we didn't have any natural defenses. I said that we don't have much of any. "Higher intelligence" is only as good as how we use it. And, in my opinion, I don't think that we use it very well at all. But I'm just crazy like that.