Humans collectively prey on nearly 15,000 wild vertebrate species, roughly one third of all varieties on the planet
From great white sharks to Bengal tigers, top predators around the world have the reputation of being sleek, fast and surgically precise in their actions. They are consummate specialists, drawing from the environment exactly what they need and keeping the ecosystem balanced in the process.
All of this comes alongside the fact that we derive most of our animal-based protein from cows, pigs and chickens which we raise and consume on an industrial scale. Domestic livestock are not included in the study’s staggering tally. Significantly, about 40 per cent of the species in the study are considered threatened, which further underscores that the amount of human harvesting of wildlife from the environment is unsustainable and undermines conservation goals that the majority countries have pledged to uphold.
“We were asking kind of a basic, fundamental question to have a better understanding of the nature of the beast, so to speak,” Dr. Darimont said. “What we didn’t know before is the extent to which we humans do this and what this has been doing to wildlife populations,” said Liana Zanette, a professor of biology at Western University in London, Ont., who was not involved in the analysis. “That is the value of this excellent study, which has collated the global data in a very rigorous way.”
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