Should the government invest in the preservation of endangered species?

[Verily]

Hey DWTL, do you know what Tragedy of the Commons is?
Again, you're acting like a 16 year old with your senseless post.

That point was not senseless, there is no reason the government should fund, sanction a private organization to do it, perhaps, but not funded by the government.  Government funding = waste

The whole point is that no individual person or organization will see it to be in their own benefit to preserve the area; that's the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Therefore, the government has to step in and do it themselves. Your ideological commitment to hating the government doesn't serve you well here.

[Verily]

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.

How you be certain that the law will then be enforced? If private contractors are enforcing the law, who forces them to enforce the law? You've surrendered the government's ability to do so in the name of ideology.

[Verily]

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...).

FTR, pre-historical humans hunted mastadons to extinction, so we did have something directly to do with their extinction. Of course, since we were still hunter-gatherers, it can still be considered a "natural" extinction (in the sense that humans were acting on instincts and no more damagingly than any other newly evolved predator species might).