Life has existed on this planet for approximately 3.7 billion years and from then to the present day a plethora of species have existed on the planet all with their unique quirks and impacts that make the world what it is today. Animals affect every aspect of our life such as our food, economy, mental-health, and more. And we thank them by causing at least 680 species to go extinct. We cannot continue to exist without our natural world and while efforts are being made, every year more species go extinct and when we bring ourselves closer to our demise. The only way to prevent this is by making the punishment for exploiting and destroying the natural world more severe. Many argue that animals do not have the same rights as humans because they don’t have sentience or feel the same emotions as humans, however it has been proven that multiple species feel empathy, fear, grief, and more that we use to identify humanity. And even the more simple organisms who may have less complex emotions still provide vital roles in an ecosystem that humans can never substitute. Destroying these creatures means destroying our future.

Does my opinion on this topic mean that I think animals should all be slaughtered with no conservation efforts to keep them around, no. We should make efforts to counter climate change, and any human interference. However this does not stop the fact that we can always have a bigger and more coherent relationship with humans than animals, they are called pets for a reason. For the many years that humanity has roamed the earth we ended up being communal species that helps each other with each others problems, dogs came in later, a subspecies of wolves evolved to hang around humans and eat their scraps. In a society where we can effectively communicate with humans and most other species have failed to communicate with us in an effective manner we should not accommodate.