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New Zealand Exterminates Rats
-brazil- writes "It's well-known that one of the worst things humans can do to a biosystem is to introduce new plants and animals that the native species are unprepared to compete with. The NZ government has been trying to reverse one such such ecological disaster in a project to exterminate rats from Campbell Island, where they were introduced by sailors 200 years ago, spread like wildfire and proceeded to severely decimate or outright eradicate many species of native seabirds. After massive deployment of rat poison two years ago, the island has now been declared a rat-free bird sanctuary, and some species that only survived in captivity will be re-introduced. Still, full recovery is estimated to take hundreds of years."
The only reason they're saving these birds is because they're cute and rats aren't. If the rats had made their way to this island on their own (airspeed velocity of a rat-laden swallow, and all that) would that have been any better?
I'll tell you, if Koala Bears ate cockroaches, nobody would complain if they got imported to New York and eradicated the cockroach population. All this Envronmental hoopla about Saving the Whales or Saving the Seals or Saving the whatever in the name of maintaining a "natural balance" is a bunch of crap. Nature gets along just fine by itself. The environment changes and life can either adapt or die. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it's always going to be.
Nobody's going to 'Save the Humans' when the next ice age comes.....even the cute ones are going down like the rest of us.