This subject seems very obvious when we talk about it and the vast majority of us seem to be clear about it, but many times when it comes to wild animals we do not fully understand the concepts and they are only kept in our minds as empty words.
To open my blog I want to list in a brief and concise way these problems that the fauna of the whole world faces...not only the African one, in order to understand the giant that many of us fight against.
The world population is growing, growing at a very fast pace, today the world population is estimated at 7700 million people and it is believed that by 2025 we will reach 8500 million, and from here comes the first problem of all "The loss of habitat".
Habitat loss - who hasn't heard this term before? Well, although it sounds very familiar, we are not aware of the extent to which this is a problem, and it is not only the harvesting of palm oil in the jungles of Borneo that is causing it, no, the mere fact that we are becoming more and cities grows means that we need more land for cultivation or for livestock. This problem, which at the moment has no easy solution, is the biggest and most important because it means that entire ecosystems have no space to continue living, plants are obviously destroyed and animals are driven out of their territories, their homes... and as a consequence, another big problem emerges: "The animal-human conflict".
Animal-human conflict: This problem derives from the previous one for a simple reason, even if we expel the fauna from their territory to build or prepare arable or livestock land, it does not mean that the animal in question understands this and leaves, it will continue to consider that site its hunting area, its burrow, its route in a migration... that is when we have the problem, the local population will be affected by the destruction of crops (wild boars that eat from an orchard), hunting of livestock (wolves or big cats that hunt domestic animals) or destruction of villages (elephant migration routes) and this human population, in order to protect itself, will hunt these animals that endanger its society without discrimination.
Diseases: Nature is relentless, and although it can sometimes captivate us with its beauty, it is a wild place that does not forgive the weak. There are diseases that are specific to each species and natural selection ensures that the strongest prevail. But unfortunately, there are many other diseases that we bring to them, as we are mixing territories as I have listed above, the diseases reach them through livestock or domestic animals.
Poaching: Poaching is hunting that is carried out without permission from nature or government reserves. This hunting can be for reasons of famine (it is complicated for a family with 6 children not to hunt 1 of the 2,000 impalas behind the fence, when they do not have resources to eat), it can be for leisure and although there is sport hunting for this purpose it is much cheaper not to pay anyone for the piece of game you want to have, or it can be to get materials for traditional medicine (tiger bones, rhino horn, pangolin scales etc.), the latter importing raw materials from all over the world to carry out.
These problems that I have listed and briefly described are only the tip of the iceberg, our planet is facing one more of its macro-extinction, but this time it is not caused by anything natural, but by us, beings that are insignificant next to the history that precedes us (we have only been here for about 350,000 years out of the 4,543 billion years that the Earth has). Going back is very complicated, but we can look to the future and be more aware of the mark we leave on it... only together we will achieve that the green heart never stops beating.
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