Crimson847 wrote:I would disagree. Frankly, prey animals are likely to end up being food for another animal in the wild anyway; the quality of their life up until that point is my primary concern.
Indeed, and their death may be considerably less humane than the deaths in your standard slaughterhouse.
Crimson847 wrote:I feel compelled to note that if taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning would argue that I should be able to skin my dog alive, or beat it whenever I have a bad day, as long as doing so brings me some significant measure of joy. Somehow I suspect you would be opposed to this.
Indeed. I believe in animal welfare, and therefore that that wanton cruelty to animals is unacceptable. However I also believe that it is acceptable to use animals for our own purposes, within reasonable limits. What defines those limits is up for debate. It seems like you are arguing that we should try to structure our actions with regards to animals such that we can only use them if this use will result in a clear net positive on the animal's life. I cannot tell if this it's an animal welfare or animal rights argument that you're making, but either way it's new to me.
I therefore have to ask you: is it acceptable to attempt to eradicate the rat populations on islands off New Zealand, killing hundreds of rats yearly merely to keep them in check, so as to preserve endangered birds who number in total perhaps the same as the rats who are being killed yearly? I would argue that it is acceptable. However I reject the standard argument that humans have a responsibility to undo the ecological damage that we did. That egg cannot be unbroken, but the ecology would eventually reach a new equilibrium without us. Nonetheless, it is enjoyable and fun for humans to see saddlebacks and kakapos in their natural habitat; and a small-scale rodent genocide is worth that benefit.
Crimson847 wrote:Have you considered the impact that a selective loss in population of these critters may have on local ecosystems, particularly in more densely populated areas? I mean, there are almost 2 million people in the metro area I live in. If only 1% of those people decide to go out and snap up a grey squirrel as a pet, that's 20,000 squirrels abruptly removed from the local ecosystems. If a commercial trade gets set up (even with limitations), you'd be looking at a lot more missing squirrels. I honestly don't know what that would do to local ecosystems, and I have even less idea what would happen in other parts of the country with different native species and ecosystems, but the possibility for serious disruption seems to be there.
1% seems unrealistically high. It might be plausible as the number of people who would take baby animals from the wild if it were allowed, it might even be low in rural areas. However it is unrealistic to assume that that 1% will all be interested in the same animal, and will collect that animal all at once.
That said, by picking squirrels in Portland you picked just about the worst animal/locality combination to make your argument. The squirrels you see in urban areas on the West Coast are non-native invasive species: eastern gray and fox squirrels. If people could decimate their population, that would be a plus, but that is not going to happen. Squirrels are r-strategists, meaning that the majority of young die before their first year. If you assume people in Portland are taking squirrels from within the city, urban habitats are created from human disruption anyways and are not some delicate equilibrium which you will ruin by collecting the squirrels. This would be true even if the squirrels in question were native, as with eastern grays in Boston or fox squirrels in Austin.
That said, I think it is highly unlikely that any collection of non-endangered animals locally is going to pose a problem. If people are collecting animals from the wild in cities, the ecosystem is so heavily based around human activities that only a few animal species tend to predominate, and these animals are wildly successful out of all proportion to their success in rural areas. Moreover, even if you managed to extinguish a species in an urban ecosystem, the fact that the keystones species in these ecosystems are humans means its unlikely to make a difference. If people are collecting from the wild in rural areas, the population density of the animals vs the population of the humans who want them generally means that humans will be a rather marginal predator.
The problem comes if you're collecting animals in rural areas for sale elsewhere. When that happens, you allow for unsustainable harvesting practices. People have been keeping lorises and tarsiers as pets for years in their local environments, but it's only when demand for them abroad lead to large-scale capturing that it become an ecological problem. Still, the collapse isn't sudden. We're seeing an ongoing population decline which lets us know that these animals should be subject to a moratorium on collection. The problem is that these animals are being collected in countries with poor conservation records and sold to countries without much respect for the rule of law. This would not be a problem in the United States, where conservation agencies could react quickly to any local population decline.
And this assumes that we will see a cottage industry of people trying to sell locally abundant species in other parts of the country. I find this rather unlikely, since the only animal the United States has which approaches the charisma of the slow loris is the raccoon, which is abundant nationwide, and which is moreover (unlike lorises or tarsiers) easy to breed in captivity.