In addition to the poll, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to answer and comment on various related questions, e.g.:
Okay, go forth and let your virtual voice be heard!
- How much more should we be helping, and in what ways? (Examples and specifics would go well with this question.)
- In what ways should we be helping less?
- If we help too much, will wild non-human people become domesticated and if so, would that be a bad thing?
- Should wild plants and wild animals be helped equally? and can you explain your response?
- Should all wild animals be helped equally?
- An infectious bacterium is technically an animal. Should we be helping it? Should we be hindering it? Can you expound upon your response?
- If infectious bacteria should be helped, should cancer cells also be helped?
- Should ticks, fleas, and mosquitos be helped? Should they be eliminated?
- How about swatting flies?
- When is/isn't it okay to deliberately smash a spider?
- How careful should we be about not smashing bugs? Should we eye the sidewalk as we walk along, treating it like an "asteroid field?"
- If bugs are infesting, eating, and killing a tree, should we help the bugs, the tree, or neither?
- If piranhas are eating a hapless, oh, antelope, should we try to save the antelope?
- How do we determine where (if anywhere) the line should be drawn between animals that should, versus shouldn't, get conscious help from humans? and would this be a fine line, a fuzzy line, or a continuum? Can you describe "what this continuum would look like?"
- What about abusive treatment of wild animals (e.g. slaughtering dolphins along with tuna fish, or slaughtering seals or whales)? What should we be doing to stop such atrocities (or don't those things constitute atrocious abuse)?
- Should we be hunting wild animals (salmon, tuna fish, deer, bears, etc.)?
- If we hunt wild animals, should the hunting be done primarily for eating the meat, or is (e.g.) slaughtering elephants for their tusks okay?
- Should we only hunt wild animals when we're really really hungry and in need of the meat?
- Should all humans be vegetarians?
- Should all humans be vegans?
- What about testing rats and stuff in laboratories?
- What about capturing wild animals and putting them in zoos, oceanariums, and dolphinariums?
- Are you opposed to all zoos, or just the ones that don't treat their non-human captives very well?
- What (if anything) would constitute adequate and humane treatment of non-human captives in a zoo? (For example, would releasing them all into the wilds be the only adequate and humane thing to do for them? and if so, should they first be rehabilitated for life in the wilds? How would humans accomplish that? What if a zoo-kept animal had never lived in the wilds, and was now an adult?)
- And any other related yet puzzling (yes even contraversial) questions you can think of.
Okay, go forth and let your virtual voice be heard!
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