Why We Should Protect Animals

Imagine a machine. A machine so utterly complex that it is impossible for one person to completely understand it. A machine so vast, with such intricate workings that tiny little changes over on one side can have ramifications miles away. Now tweak a setting, unclip a wire, replace a mechanical part. How can you know whether the rest of the machine will continue working properly?

The Earth is that machine: the world in which we live is put together so delicately and with such precision that messing around with it can cause serious trouble. That's exactly what humans have been doing for a very, very long time. Thankfully, the world is also a very resilient machine - it tries to adapt and repair itself as best it can, despite all our meddling!

Our knowledge of animals, biology and ecosystems has advanced rapidly over the past few generations. We have taken huge steps forward in understanding how all the tiny little pieces of our world fit together, how they interact and how they form a self-supporting system that could look after itself for millenia to come. What we refuse to learn, in many ways, is that humans are an anomaly in that system.

Living as we do at the top of the food chain and considering ourselves more than mere beasts, we have given ourselves immense power. No other animal can create or destroy as we can. No other animal demands as much space and as many raw materials to continue living. Given that we're the ones with the opposable thumbs and developed brains, this is quite normal.

It is, however, a little too easy to forget that we are still just animals, biologically speaking. Despite our elevated consciousness and incredible capabilities, we need to eat, to drink, to breathe - and we need the natural world to keep functioning if we are to do those things. We need to understand the impact of our actions on our ecosystem, so that we can avoid removing parts that are essential for our survival.

This is one reason why we must protect animals. Although our knowledge is deep, we cannot yet claim to know everything about our planet. We can't foresee the problems we could cause ourselves if we were to remove a species of animal, to destroy a habitat, to mow down an entire genus. What if the cure for cancer was accidentally obliterated because we wanted to build a new housing complex on the only land where the animal that creates it lived? What if we wiped out all of a really annoying bug, only to belatedly discover that they were essential to the production of oxygen?

Our intelligence is also the source of another reason for protecting animals: we have emotions. We are capable of understanding that animals feel pain and suffer. Since they can't speak for themselves - well, not in a language we can understand, anyway - it falls to us as thinking beings to consider what they need, as best we can.

In all, by being the most intellectually evolved species on the planet, we have the responsibility to protect those less able to do so themselves.