Why People Suck: Part 1

By Camoron

Ok, try to exercise a little bit of self-control here, because I’m about to get racist. That’s right; I am going to be getting angry at the entire human race.

Where to begin, where to begin... There’s just so much that we have done to kill everything else! So much so that this shall become an ongoing series on why people suck.

Anyone who has seen ‘The Matrix’ will know of Mr Smith’s awesome quote, ‘Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.’ Ok, so while I don’t feed of human energy by keeping them in pods, and I am pretty sure that I am more than just computer code, I agree wholeheartedly with the honourable Mr Smith.

Okay, so I think I know where this rant will be heading, and it’s a pretty obvious direction. Wherever people go, they domesticate what they can, and kill everything else. When Julius Caesar said “I Came, I Saw, I Conquered”, he was pretty much summing up the human race. Throughout history, whenever we discover a new land, we have gone in, mapped everything, made friends with the locals and taken back some plants and animals to study. Then we come back with ships full of people, chop down the natural environment, force the indigenous population to abide by new laws and customs, and basically try to make it is similar to the urbanized wasteland we have come from.

Throughout history, there have been periods of mass species extinction. Previously, these have been caused by giant meteors hitting earth, huge changes in temperature or environment, or even global volcanic eruptions. We are currently in one of these periods. That’s right, the human race is as devastating to the natural environment as an asteroid hitting the earth, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. So yay us!

How did we manage such an amazing feat? We are so set in our view of how the world should be, that we get rid of anything native to replace it with something we recognize, hence the feral animals and weeds that ran rampant all over Australia. Developed countries where people have enough money to get any house location they want are experiencing urban sprawl to the point of running out of space fit for living, and coincidentally, running out of habitat for many species. Our everyday lives revolve around power, whether it be heating, lighting, cooking or reading a blog online. We are constantly pumping gasses into the atmosphere, and waste into our river ways. And if an animal is rare or endangered, what do we do? We go out with our guns and we hunt it down. The less there is of something, the more we seek to destroy it.

Okay, so what about the animals we don’t kill? Chickens must be pretty happy with their lives, right? Cows wouldn’t be living like they do without us, would they? Pigs must prefer the safety of their pins to the dangerous wild, surely? Well yeah, all these animals wouldn’t be able to survive without us. But they weren’t always like this.

Let’s start way back, before agriculture was a thing. People roamed around, hunting and gathering. The earliest known animal to be domesticated was the dog, and they roamed alongside man, flushing out the wildlife for their masters to kill. Let’s move forward a bit, and now we have started keeping cows for their milk and meat. Sheep and pigs are also starting to be used. Further some more, and people are riding horses, using donkeys and oxen to move and carry, now are able to get wool from sheep, and have dogs cuddled up with them at home. But all these animals didn’t start like this. They became these slaves of human want and need through a process of artificial selection.

We all know and love the process of natural selection, or evolution. The individual animals more able to pass on their genes have more children, and therefore the traits they possess become more common. People have their own spin-off of this called artificial selection, where we choose which traits we like, and get rid of the rest. Originally, horses weren’t the hulking beasts that they are now. They were small, and pretty much useless. So the ancient Mongolians who found them were like, "Hey! Check it out! If these things were big and stuff, we could use them to carry our things!" So they took the biggest ones they could find, and started breeding them. Each generation they would keep the biggest ones to breed the next generation. Guess what happened to the ones that didn’t get better. Yeah, back then they didn’t care whether it was horse meat or cow meat in their meatballs.

And this isn’t an isolated event either. Throughout history, we have bred animals to be easier to command, larger, woollier, and more or less fatty, you get the idea. We actually change the genes of an animal species to make it suit our purposes, without any concern for the ones that don’t. And the repercussions extend further than the animals that die. The animals that live are never the same either.

Multiple studies have shown a few things in common in all domesticated animals. Ears get floppy, they are born trusting humans, and here’s the killer, their brains get smaller. So domesticated animals? We kill their family, limit their freedom, and decrease their intelligence.

We are the worst plague ever to sweep the globe. It is my view that the world would be far better off if we had never evolved from monkeys, because the human race is the greatest monster of all.

For more information about animal domestication occurs and its affects, I suggest the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which did a great episode about just that topic.