Many people say it’s bad to interfere with nature whether helping animals in distress or feeding them because they will end up depending on humans. If we share the space and humans will be around animals, why is it seen as bad? Over time would it be possible to more than coexist with animals?
In: Biology
From predators to herbivores, it’s better if animals have a healthy fear of people.
Herbivores/omnivores need to eat a LOT to survive. They tend to graze on a variety of things because that’s what nature grows. That’s how they get the nutrients they need and it’s also a big factor in helping a lot of plants reproduce and receive fertilizer.
When humans start feeding and getting friendly with these critters, they alter their patterns because behaviorally speaking they’ll take the safest, most reliable food source they can get. Humans can inadvertently give these creatures a “bad diet”. For example, people like to feed birds bread, but that’s basically bird junk food. Birds in areas where humans do this are more prone to dying of malnutrition or diseases that bad nutrition makes them susceptible to. They are not smart enough to understand the bread is a snack. It fills their belly and their brains say that’s what they need.
Worse, it makes the animals less fearful of humans, and not every human is nice and not every human wants the animals around. “Friendly” deer don’t mind destroying a garden, and getting close to them sucks because if you DO frighten them their kicks can cause severe injuries. These animals can carry ticks and fleas and other things that they bring into yards with them. Their poop can have parasites that household pets and even humans can contract. The animals can be more likely to want to be near roads. There’s just a list that goes on and on and on about how these animals can be harmed or harm people.
Predators should also have a healthy fear of people. We are relatively small, relatively weak, and our main defense is being able to plan how to kill things with tools without being seen or having to get near them.
Sometimes a predator will learn to be friendly to people in order to get food. They are still a predator. Many animal behavioralists famous for being able to “tame” things like bears and wolves have, in the end, been killed by the creatures they supposedly tamed. When bears learn there is food inside human houses and aren’t afraid of humans, they start breaking into houses to find food. When a bear gets scared, it is EXTREMELY dangerous to humans. Same thing with smaller predators like coyotes. If they think humans are noisy, unpredictable, dangerous creatures they will keep a healthy distance. If they think humans are no big deal, they’ll get closer. That can mean they decide to find out if a toddler at the far end of a back yard makes easy prey. Spoiler: toddlers are really easy prey.
Can we coexist? Sure. Look at dogs. We domesticated them over thousands of years of selective breeding. But it’s not perfect. People die from dog attacks, even from their own pets! Similarly, plenty of people end up in the hospital from cats that were *playing*. They’re still animals and don’t perfectly understand they shouldn’t hurt us. Heck, HUMANS don’t perfectly understand not to hurt each other.
What makes it worse with wild animals is if one person is friendly and tames them, that makes the animal less afraid of other people who maybe don’t want deer, coyotes, or bears in their back yard. The more the animal gets used to people the less deterrents like lights or noise will keep them away. A lot of times when you read stories about neighborhoods having problems with bears, residents can trace the issue back to when one new person moved in and started feeding them or just plain not protecting their trash from them.
So for many, many reasons, we can harm animals and they can harm us if we get too friendly. It’s best if we respect each other and keep a distance. In theory two humans can form a pact and work together for survival. Animals don’t understand pacts. They may be friendly one moment, then lash out and kill a human over seemingly nothing.
(This is why people like to refer to people they don’t like as “animals”, it implies those people don’t want to do what it takes to have a society thus they HARM society. Think about how that applies to people who take and never give back.)
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