According to the documentary “black fish” orcas are highly socialized animals, baby orcas will never leave their mother, yet in SeaWorld the workers simply drop orcas caught in different places in to the same pool and form a “family”. Which is unethical because they “have different genes and languages, it is just a man made artificial family”, Said a marine scientist who was interviewed in the documentary. What’s more is that they have even lied about the truth of the life span of orcas in order to make people believe that it is a safer thing to do to keep orcas with them. While people are manipulating the truth of animals a question was asked— do humans have any responsibility to protect animals and their environment? I believe the answer is simple: of course.
First of all, human is actually much more responsible to many extinctions of species. According to researches done by WWF (world wide fund of nature) human led extinction is about 100-1000times higher than what the nature decided. For example: Raphus cucullatus or better known as Dodo birds. This is a type of flightless bird. It once lived on the island of Mauritius before extinction. In September 1598 a crew of Dutch sailors was caught in a storm and they drifted on sea for three weeks long weeks until they found Mauritius, at that moment they’ve ran out of food. As a result, they started hunting them down for food. Later on, more people were curious about the taste of dodos and came to Mauritius to hunt for them and even steal their eggs to eat. Due to over hunting of dodos at the year 1681, which is only 83 years later the dodos went out of sight on the world. Since human is a main cause of species extinction I believe that it is a right thing for human to do to pay their responsibility to protecting animals.
Secondly, we humans also live in the nature and we use what nature provides us so actually saving the environment of the other animals is also a way of salvation. Through protecting species and their living environment we are also protecting the things that make our life easier and comfortable. For example, fresh air, drinkable water, foods and so on. Let’s just have a quick look at the lung of the earth— the Amazon Forest. It covers up to 700000000kilometer square of land and is a shelter for over 10000types of animals yet only 200 where discovered. Sadly, due the booming population people started to cut down the forest. From 1991 to 2000(only 9 years time) the total area of forest lost in the Amazon rose from 415,000 to 587,000 square kilometers which is 41.45%higher (britannica.com). If deforestation keeps going on like this, not only the shelter of many species will disappear but we will also lose our biggest oxygen producer. As said above, while we are paying responsibility saving other animals and the environment they live in we are also saving our own living space and the resources we need to use.
Finally, paying the responsibility of not to interfere in the nature’s selection is also something human beings should do. Sir Charles Darwin once said in his theory of the revolution: “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change.” (gutenberg.org).There was once a story like this: human in a village loved the deer living in the forest nearby but the wolves around will always pay visit in time and hunt down some deer. The local hunters are very angry at the wolves so they took their guns and killed all the wolves in the nearby dens. At first, the deer lived very peacefully and enjoyed a carefree life, but later on because there are no more predators the amount of deer rose up rapidly and very soon the grass was all eaten up by the deer. As a result, the deer lost their food and many of them died because of hunger（Hu）.Behind this story, we can see that wolves help to keep the amount of deer in a reasonable number and more over, they are the way of selecting genes for deer; the weaker deer will become food and the fitter ones will survive and continue passing their strong genes down to the next generation. But because of the mindless and irresponsible interference of hunters they broke the balance of nature and this has lead to a chaos for the deer in the forest. We humans should not judge or question the choice of nature simply by looking at what we want or choose to see. Nature always has its reasons of why something happens, the responsibility we humans need to pay for protecting animals is actually sometimes just to sit and watch.
Do humans have any responsibility to protect animals and their environment? I believe the answer is quite obvious till now, of course we do have the responsibility of protecting animals and their environment. Not only because we humans are now the strongest specie in the world or for salvation, but also simply because while we are protecting their environment we are also protecting our own world. But do remember, paying responsibility does not mean that we must take actions in order to protect it, sometimes doing noting might be the best way of protecting it.
