Should the government invest in the preservation of endangered species?

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

Yes - as a national resource, it is the government's duty.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

Because there is absolutley no reason why we need to protect these animals, people should be free to hunt what they want.  If people want to protect them they can petition the government to get some kind of power to stop it.  I don't want my taxpayers dollars going into discouraging hunting

Go ask a biologist how useless animals are.  You will get enlightened on how ridiculously complicated ecosystems can be and how the sizable reduction (not even the extinction) of even one single species can have drastic, far-reaching consequences (by way of removing the natural predator of another species, for example) that have tons of ramifications that directly affect humans.

What happens if overfishing was allowed to continue indefinitely until there were no fish left in the sea?  Then what?  Do you have any idea how vitally important they are to the global ecosystem, not even mentioning how important they are to many economies?  Just as no man is an island, neither is any animal an island, either - everything that is done to any species on the planet has consequences affecting all of the others.  It's not doing it solely for the animals' sake; it's doing it because not doing it will negatively affect humans, too.

I still fail to see why a private organization sanctioned by the government could not do the same thing, we outsource everything else

Because it's a national resource - are you advocating that we privatise the DNR, national and state parks too?

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

How is a private organization going to save the panda if the government refuses to pass a law making it illegal to hunt pandas?

The government can pass the law but pass the cost of enforcing it off to others.

You want to privatize law enforcement?  WTF?

Law enforcement if where talking about endangered species, I'm not advocating actual police being privitized.

Well then where DO you draw the line?  If you privatize this, do you privatize the DNR and keeping people from poaching?  DNR officials DO carry guns, so now you are talking about getting privatized security guards to keep poachers out - that's a dangerous road to privatizing the police force.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I don't know if this is what DWTL is saying but the government does not do everything it decrees to happen by itself. For instance, if the government decides that children are to get public education they may not build the school buildings themselves but contract it out to some private company. And so on. Of course, enforcing laws by violence has to be made by the state to uphold its monopoly on violence, one of the corner-stones of civilization.

As regards the question, I'd say it depends. If there is some point to it other than saving an endangered species or if there is some public interest and people ready to pay for it, I guess. Otherwise, I don't think there is a point to saving species for its own sake. The aforementioned Tragedy of the Commons only become relevant if we're talking about edible fishes running out due to over-fishing, etc not concerning pandas or other completely irrelevant species.

Then I would question your understanding of ecosystems and how they function as a system.

There are advantages to keeping species from going extinct due to human influences beyond "oh, it's cute and fuzzy" or serving some purpose to human existence.

Well, that would count towards human existence wouldn't it? If a species is not important for the survival of humanity (even indirectly) I don't see why tax money should go towards protecting it. It seems sort of arbitrary to me.

And how do we figure out what's important to human survival?  Nobody would've guessed that by using DDT that that would have effected fish which effected birds.  Who knows what the elimination of just one "trivial" species will do to the whole food chain.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I'd like to note that the same goes for the introduction of (most) non-native species - which often lead to the extinction of other species.  (There are some exceptions, salmon in the Great lakes which helped get rid of some non-native species, and honey bees brought over from Europe).

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

Could we stop going back and forth about who said what and who speaks English well and who doesn't and actually discuss this?

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

Could we stop going back and forth about who said what and who speaks English well and who doesn't and actually discuss this?

That's sort of what I was trying to do originally...since my two little jesters seem to have run out of things to say for the time being I'll mention that my reply to the poll question is yes, given how reliant we are on many species. However, since the eradication of species and the evolution of new ones is a natural course of events I don't really consider it the government's duty to protect species that have played out their role in nature. Most species wipe out other species as they emerge and there is no reason to expect humanity to be different in this aspect. I don't see any moral obligation to try and maintain some artificial nature that would have existed if we had not been around.

You bring up a good point - true animals go extinct on my own - and if we see a species going out and we can't figure out why/figure out it's not due to us, I say leave it alone.  But I'm willing to bet that at least 90% of currently endangered species aren't due to this reason (I won't say 90% of extinct species, since this # is obviously less - we didn't lead to the extinction of dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, mastadons, etc...).