this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
793 points (96.4% liked)

Comic Strips

12626 readers
3456 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They addressed the elephant issue in their comment. I recommend you read it again. The summary is elephants evolved without predation, so they don't bread in large numbers. Prey animals breed with the assumption a not-insignificant portion of their population will die prematurely due to predation. If this doesn't happen then their population balloons until it consumes all available resources, then it collapses.

This happens fairly frequently where we've removed predators from the ecosystem. Its why we promote deer hunting, for example. We've removed their natural predators, and if they aren't culled then they will grow until they collapse. This is well understood and not controversial.

I guess we could engineer the planet until this isn't an issue, but that'll take a few millenia and probably isn't the best idea. Let nature be natural. It'd be fascist to assume it's our domain to conquer and dominate into submission.