Lions, tigers, elephants, camels and cheetahs wild in US? (1 Viewer)

[Peter-PP]

I hope it doesn't happen! There was a reason why Mother Nature got rid of them 13000 years ago and they were not even the same species, they were totally different species.
Here is the LINK

I apologize if this has already been discussed here!

Thanks,

Pete

 

[Garrett Lundy]

The Army Of The Twelve Monkeys Did It!

 

[BrianW]

It wasn't Mother Nature who eliminated similar creatures from North America. It was humans who hunted them to extinction.

 

[Chris Lockwood]

Animals hunting other animals sounds like nature to me.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Heck they just dug up a Wooly Mammoth skeleton in San Jose about a month ago. These critters did live around here.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...ed=rss.bayarea

 

[BrianW]

Even so, since we are the only animals intelligent and adaptable enough to wipe out entire species while still vastly increasing our own numbers, it behooves us to make a distinction between human and non-human predatory-based extinction. Wolves can't eat everything in sight and still thrive the way we can. Like it or not, we have the ability as a species to impact nature in devastating ways like no other creature. To the extent that our ability to cause damage to ecosystems far exceeds that of other animals, it is useful for us to regard our excessive impact as being outside of nature for the purposes of determining what the optimal and most beneficial natural balance should be.

 

[Peter-PP]

That is only a theory not yet fully proven. There were no humans when the dinos existed and yet nature wiped them out for some reason.

 

[Julian Reville]

At first thought, the idea of introducing foreign species of animals to the USA is so patently absurd, that I can't believe someone actually proposed it. On second thought, this is such a crazy world, it might just happen.

I'm really surprised some Congressperson hasn't suggested cloning dinos as a way of replenishing US oil reserves.

 

[Chris Lockwood]

> since we are the only animals intelligent and adaptable enough to wipe out entire species while still vastly increasing our own numbers, it behooves us to make a distinction between human and non-human predatory-based extinction.

Not really, if you're talking about prehistoric people. Why do you think they hunted those animals? The same reason animals kill other animals, to eat them and/or defend themselves. I'm just trying to get beyond the "animals good, people bad" prejudice.

 

[BrianW]

Chris, even forgetting the fact that prehistoric humans were the most intelligent and adaptable mammals on Earth, it's not a bad/good prejudice at play here. It's simply an attempt to determine our role in nature and optimizing our effect on it. As intelligent creatures, we alone have that capability.

Otherwise, I could agree with you and thus conclude that letting elephants and large predators roam wild in North America is a great idea because “animals introducing other animals into a non-native habitat in order to experiment with ecosystems sounds like nature to me.”

You can't have it both ways. If everything we do as animals, such as hunting a species to extinction, is perfectly natural, then so is screwing with nature by importing non-native species and cloning dinosaurs.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Hilarious discussion. Even if you wanted to do it, this "rewilding" would be totally impractical -- and unlike the Great Plains Project jokers, I have no fondness for the idea of fostering populations of large predators to roam across the landscape. To put it bluntly, this is not the Pleistocene, and the environments available in North America are not ones where these creatures are likely to thrive. The only real exception would be the camel, which as I understand was introduced into the American West at the urging of Jefferson Davis [then U.S. Secretary of War]. I understand that they have done relatively well in Arizona, as in the Western Desert of Australia.

 

[clayton b]

This seems kinda iffy to me. As already stated, how can they know for sure that these animals were hunted into extinction? The natives in Africa never hunted these animals to extinction there.

Also, has anyone here ever talked to someone who has lived in Africa around those animals? From what I gather they live in fear of large predators and stampeding herds of elephants. If they were to do something like this, it would have to be controlled in the extreme. We're talking 100 acre fenced in zoos. Can you imagine the cost?