saving animals essay

Short Essay on Save Animals [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

In this session, you will know how you can write essays on Save Animals . Here I will write three sets of essays on the same topic covering different word limits concerning the different exam patterns.

Short essay on save animals in 100 words, short essay on save animals in 200 words, short essay on save animals in 400 words.

Feature image of Short Essay on Save Animals

As part of the ecosystem, all living beings have the right to survive. A force in the world can claim the life of a living creature, be it an animal, bird, or human being. Even mute animals have reasons and purposes to survive. So if they are uselessly harmed then humans have to protest against that. The wildlife must be saved through protection laws and creating specific spaces for them.

Several campaigns like ‘’ save animals’’ are produced often to rescue wildlife from unnecessary hunting, skinning, and selling of animals. Excessive violence towards the animals will lead to the disbalance of the ecosystem. Thus wildlife sanctuaries, bird museums, reserve forests, and zoos are created for the preservation of animals.

As human beings, it is our responsibility to create a safe and secure place for all living beings on earth. We must remember that we share the earth with different parts of the ecosystem. The ecosystem includes flora and fauna; the fauna again has several animals and birds to survive on earth.

While humans are rational creatures, they also must keep their aggression against animals in check. They must remember one thing for sure- that they share the earth with everyone. Animals and birds are not provided with a more thoughtful system so that they can protect themselves. So often they are victims of hunting and poaching. They are sold at high rates and killed for human benefit.

Killing and selling animals have a huge demand in the local as well as the international markets. The tusks, skins, nails, teeth, and other parts of the animal body are used to manufacture different products for decoration. But while humans enjoy these products, we forget how we are affecting the ecosystem of the earth.

Even the loss of one animal can lead to severe imbalances in the food chain of the world. Thus saving animals is one of the primary duties of all human beings. If we pledge to care for them, then they can find a more secure place on earth. Saving the animals is our biggest virtue.

Nowadays several issues and problems on earth get covered by the media and campaigns. One of the most significant campaigns that often attracts our attention is the ‘’save animals’’ campaign, which is organized in several parts of the world. Now, why is it important to save the animals or what outcome will that bring if we save animals? Let us discuss this in greater detail.

When the earth was first created several life forms started occupying it. The world was soon populated by ye smallest as well as the largest creatures. While the microscopic organisms survived beyond our notice, huge animals like the dinosaurs and even the most intelligent animals such as humans both survived on earth at different periods of time.

So humans are equipped with the power to rescue all animals on the earth. It is one of the most important duties of humans to look after their fellow beings that they are surrounded. The campaigns conducted for the safety of animals are important which helps to spread awareness regarding them.

Animal safety is important as they build up our ecosystem and a little imbalance in their quantity can create a great problem in the life cycle of the earth. Often laws are made to deforest several acres of land and also to hunt a specific group of animals for human benefit. Recently a law has been published in Canada to hunt and kill several wolves for making some industries.

Almost immediately several campaigns were organized to protect the rights of the wild animals. Pledges were signed, petitions were written, and campaign walks were organized to save wildlife. So it becomes quite important for humans to consider the safety of the animals as well as themselves.

Animals are mostly terrified of hunting and poaching. Baby animals are targeted the most. They are hunted and often trapped for selling them to circus companies. Even these cubs are killed for their meat and skin, which have huge demands in the market. The skins, teeth, nails, hooves, tusks, and meat are sold for creating sophisticated things. Also, deforestation is a principal reason for the depletion of animals.

Hence what is the greatest duty is to reduce human aggression towards animals as they are all parts of the same nature we use. Like our blood relatives, these animals are related to us. So protecting them is our primary job. If animals are saved then we can create great harmony between ourselves and the world.

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Why save endangered animals?

01/12/1974 by Jane Warley

From Amur Leopards , Black Rhinos and Bornean Orangutans to Hawksbill Turtles , Vaquitas and bluefin tuna, there are many endangered animals that are at risk of extinction. What that means is that we are at risk of losing these animals completely.

Orangutan - an example of an endangered animal

We put considerable time, effort and money into saving endangered animals, but why? Extinction is a natural process that would happen with or without humans. But, while that is the case, research shows that extinctions are happening quicker now than ever before. And, loss of habitat is by far the biggest cause. This is a problem that we need to address, and here are a few reasons why.

1. For the enjoyment of future generations

Tiger - an example of an endangered animal

One of the strongest arguments for saving endangered animals is simply that we want to. We get a lot of pleasure out of seeing and interacting with animals. Species that go extinct now are no longer around for us or future generations to see and enjoy. They can only learn about them in books and on the internet. And, that is heartbreaking.

2. For the environment and other animals

Everything in nature is connected. If you remove one animal or plant it upsets the balance of nature, can change the ecosystem completely and may cause other animals to suffer. For example, bees may seem small and insignificant, but they have a huge role to play in our ecosystem – they are pollinators. This means they are responsible for the reproduction plants. Without bees, many plant species would go extinct, which would upset the entire foodchain. Read more about bees here .

3. For medicinal purposes

Many of our medicines have come from or been inspired by nature. The loss of plants and animals to extinction takes with it the potential for new cures and drugs that we have yet to discover.

What can you do to help endangered animals?

There are many things we can do to help endangered animals, here are a few suggestions.

Protect wildlife habitats. Habitat loss is one of the biggest causes of extinction. Do your bit to preserve wildlife habitats. Volunteer to maintain a local nature reserve, campaign against deforestation or create a space for nature in your garden.
Educate others. People are more likely to want to save animals if they know about them. Spend time doing some research and spread the word.
Stay away from pesticides and herbicides. Animals are venerable to pollutants that can build up in the environment and can die if they consume high levels.
Shop ethically. Avoid buying products made from endangered animals, such as rhino horns .
Be an ethical tourist. We all love spending time with animals, but the rise of animal experiences abroad is endangering the lives of many animals. Often they are treated cruelly and kept t in unsatisfactory conditions. Pick your experiences wisely, find out more here .

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November 1, 2023

20 min read

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis

By Robert Kunzig

Light and dark brown striped fish with iridescent fins shown against a black background.

Snail Darter Percina tanasi. Listed as Endangered: 1975. Status: Delisted in 2022.

A Bald Eagle disappeared into the trees on the far bank of the Tennessee River just as the two researchers at the bow of our modest motorboat began hauling in the trawl net. Eagles have rebounded so well that it's unusual not to see one here these days, Warren Stiles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me as the net got closer. On an almost cloudless spring morning in the 50th year of the Endangered Species Act, only a third of a mile downstream from the Tennessee Valley Authority's big Nickajack Dam, we were searching for one of the ESA's more notorious beneficiaries: the Snail Darter. A few months earlier Stiles and the FWS had decided that, like the Bald Eagle, the little fish no longer belonged on the ESA's endangered species list. We were hoping to catch the first nonendangered specimen.

Dave Matthews, a TVA biologist, helped Stiles empty the trawl. Bits of wood and rock spilled onto the deck, along with a Common Logperch maybe six inches long. So did an even smaller fish; a hair over two inches, it had alternating vertical bands of dark and light brown, each flecked with the other color, a pattern that would have made it hard to see against the gravelly river bottom. It was a Snail Darter in its second year, Matthews said, not yet full-grown.

Everybody loves a Bald Eagle. There is much less consensus about the Snail Darter. Yet it epitomizes the main controversy still swirling around the ESA, signed into law on December 28, 1973, by President Richard Nixon: Can we save all the obscure species of this world, and should we even try, if they get in the way of human imperatives? The TVA didn't think so in the 1970s, when the plight of the Snail Darter—an early entry on the endangered species list—temporarily stopped the agency from completing a huge dam. When the U.S. attorney general argued the TVA's case before the Supreme Court with the aim of sidestepping the law, he waved a jar that held a dead, preserved Snail Darter in front of the nine judges in black robes, seeking to convey its insignificance.

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Now I was looking at a living specimen. It darted around the bottom of a white bucket, bonking its nose against the side and delicately fluttering the translucent fins that swept back toward its tail.

“It's kind of cute,” I said.

Matthews laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “I like this guy!” he said. “Most people are like, ‘Really? That's it?’ ” He took a picture of the fish and clipped a sliver off its tail fin for DNA analysis but left it otherwise unharmed. Then he had me pour it back into the river. The next trawl, a few miles downstream, brought up seven more specimens.

In the late 1970s the Snail Darter seemed confined to a single stretch of a single tributary of the Tennessee River, the Little Tennessee, and to be doomed by the TVA's ill-considered Tellico Dam, which was being built on the tributary. The first step on its twisting path to recovery came in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, surprisingly, that the ESA gave the darter priority even over an almost finished dam. “It was when the government stood up and said, ‘Every species matters, and we meant it when we said we're going to protect every species under the Endangered Species Act,’” says Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Delisted in 2007. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Today the Snail Darter can be found along 400 miles of the river's main stem and multiple tributaries. ESA enforcement has saved dozens of other species from extinction. Bald Eagles, American Alligators and Peregrine Falcons are just a few of the roughly 60 species that had recovered enough to be “delisted” by late 2023.

And yet the U.S., like the planet as a whole, faces a growing biodiversity crisis. Less than 6 percent of the animals and plants ever placed on the list have been delisted; many of the rest have made scant progress toward recovery. What's more, the list is far from complete: roughly a third of all vertebrates and vascular plants in the U.S. are vulnerable to extinction, says Bruce Stein, chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. Populations are falling even for species that aren't yet in danger. “There are a third fewer birds flying around now than in the 1970s,” Stein says. We're much less likely to see a White-throated Sparrow or a Red-winged Blackbird, for example, even though neither species is yet endangered.

The U.S. is far emptier of wildlife sights and sounds than it was 50 years ago, primarily because habitat—forests, grasslands, rivers—has been relentlessly appropriated for human purposes. The ESA was never designed to stop that trend, any more than it is equipped to deal with the next massive threat to wildlife: climate change. Nevertheless, its many proponents say, it is a powerful, foresightful law that we could implement more wisely and effectively, perhaps especially to foster stewardship among private landowners. And modest new measures, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act—a bill with bipartisan support—could further protect flora and fauna.

That is, if special interests don't flout the law. After the 1978 Supreme Court decision, Congress passed a special exemption to the ESA allowing the TVA to complete the Tellico Dam. The Snail Darter managed to survive because the TVA transplanted some of the fish from the Little Tennessee, because remnant populations turned up elsewhere in the Tennessee Valley, and because local rivers and streams slowly became less polluted following the 1972 Clean Water Act, which helped fish rebound.

Under pressure from people enforcing the ESA, the TVA also changed the way it managed its dams throughout the valley. It started aerating the depths of its reservoirs, in some places by injecting oxygen. It began releasing water from the dams more regularly to maintain a minimum flow that sweeps silt off the river bottom, exposing the clean gravel that Snail Darters need to lay their eggs and feed on snails. The river system “is acting more like a real river,” Matthews says. Basically, the TVA started considering the needs of wildlife, which is really what the ESA requires. “The Endangered Species Act works,” Matthews says. “With just a little bit of help, [wildlife] can recover.”

The trouble is that many animals and plants aren't getting that help—because government resources are too limited, because private landowners are alienated by the ESA instead of engaged with it, and because as a nation the U.S. has never fully committed to the ESA's essence. Instead, for half a century, the law has been one more thing that polarizes people's thinking.

I t may seem impossible today to imagine the political consensus that prevailed on environmental matters in 1973. The U.S. Senate approved the ESA unanimously, and the House passed it by a vote of 390 to 12. “Some people have referred to it as almost a statement of religion coming out of the Congress,” says Gary Frazer, who as assistant director for ecological services at the FWS has been overseeing the act's implementation for nearly 25 years.

Gopher Tortoise Gopherus polyphemus . Listed as Threatened: 1987. Status: Still threatened. Credit: ©Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

But loss of faith began five years later with the Snail Darter case. Congresspeople who had been thinking of eagles, bears and Whooping Cranes when they passed the ESA, and had not fully appreciated the reach of the sweeping language they had approved, were disabused by the Supreme Court. It found that the legislation had created, “wisely or not ... an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said after the Snail Darter case concluded. Even a recently discovered tiny fish had to be saved, “whatever the cost,” he wrote in the decision.

Was that wise? For both environmentalists such as Curry and many nonenvironmentalists, the answer has always been absolutely. The ESA “is the basic Bill of Rights for species other than ourselves,” says National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who is building a “photo ark” of every animal visible to the naked eye as a record against extinction. (He has taken studio portraits of 15,000 species so far.) But to critics, the Snail Darter decision always defied common sense. They thought it was “crazy,” says Michael Bean, a leading ESA expert, now retired from the Environmental Defense Fund. “That dichotomy of view has remained with us for the past 45 years.”

According to veteran Washington, D.C., environmental attorney Lowell E. Baier, author of a new history called The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, both the act itself and its early implementation reflected a top-down, federal “command-and-control mentality” that still breeds resentment. FWS field agents in the early days often saw themselves as combat biologists enforcing the act's prohibitions. After the Northern Spotted Owl's listing got tangled up in a bitter 1990s conflict over logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, the FWS became more flexible in working out arrangements. “But the dark mythology of the first 20 years continues in the minds of much of America,” Baier says.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( map ); Source: David Matthews, Tennessee Valley Authority ( reference )

The law can impose real burdens on landowners. Before doing anything that might “harass” or “harm” an endangered species, including modifying its habitat, they need to get a permit from the FWS and present a “habitat conservation plan.” Prosecutions aren't common, because evidence can be elusive, but what Bean calls “the cloud of uncertainty” surrounding what landowners can and cannot do can be distressing.

Requirements the ESA places on federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management—or on the TVA—can have large economic impacts. Section 7 of the act prohibits agencies from taking, permitting or funding any action that is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of a listed species. If jeopardy seems possible, the agency must consult with the FWS first (or the National Marine Fisheries Service for marine species) and seek alternative plans.

“When people talk about how the ESA stops projects, they've been talking about section 7,” says conservation biologist Jacob Malcom. The Northern Spotted Owl is a strong example: an economic analysis suggests the logging restrictions eliminated thousands of timber-industry jobs, fueling conservative arguments that the ESA harms humans and economic growth.

In recent decades, however, that view has been based “on anecdote, not evidence,” Malcom claims. At Defenders of Wildlife, where he worked until 2022 (he's now at the U.S. Department of the Interior), he and his colleagues analyzed 88,290 consultations between the FWS and other agencies from 2008 to 2015. “Zero projects were stopped,” Malcom says. His group also found that federal agencies were only rarely taking the active measures to recover a species that section 7 requires—like what the TVA did for the Snail Darter. For many listed species, the FWS does not even have recovery plans.

Endangered species also might not recover because “most species are not receiving protection until they have reached dangerously low population sizes,” according to a 2022 study by Erich K. Eberhard of Columbia University and his colleagues. Most listings occur only after the FWS has been petitioned or sued by an environmental group—often the Center for Biological Diversity, which claims credit for 742 listings. Years may go by between petition and listing, during which time the species' population dwindles. Noah Greenwald, the center's endangered species director, thinks the FWS avoids listings to avoid controversy—that it has internalized opposition to the ESA.

He and other experts also say that work regarding endangered species is drastically underfunded. As more species are listed, the funding per species declines. “Congress hasn't come to grips with the biodiversity crisis,” says Baier, who lobbies lawmakers regularly. “When you talk to them about biodiversity, their eyes glaze over.” Just this year federal lawmakers enacted a special provision exempting the Mountain Valley Pipeline from the ESA and other challenges, much as Congress had exempted the Tellico Dam. Environmentalists say the gas pipeline, running from West Virginia to Virginia, threatens the Candy Darter, a colorful small fish. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided a rare bit of good news: it granted the FWS $62.5 million to hire more biologists to prepare recovery plans.

The ESA is often likened to an emergency room for species: overcrowded and understaffed, it has somehow managed to keep patients alive, but it doesn't do much more. The law contains no mandate to restore ecosystems to health even though it recognizes such work as essential for thriving wildlife. “Its goal is to make things better, but its tools are designed to keep things from getting worse,” Bean says. Its ability to do even that will be severely tested in coming decades by threats it was never designed to confront.

T he ESA requires a species to be listed as “threatened” if it might be in danger of extinction in the “foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future will be warmer. Rising average temperatures are a problem, but higher heat extremes are a bigger threat, according to a 2020 study.

Scientists have named climate change as the main cause of only a few extinctions worldwide. But experts expect that number to surge. Climate change has been “a factor in almost every species we've listed in at least the past 15 years,” Frazer says. Yet scientists struggle to forecast whether individual species can “persist in place or shift in space”—as Stein and his co-authors put it in a recent paper—or will be unable to adapt at all and will go extinct. On June 30 the FWS issued a new rule that will make it easier to move species outside their historical range—a practice it once forbade except in extreme circumstances.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( graphic ); Brown Bird Design ( illustrations ); Sources: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental Conservation Online System; U.S. Federal Endangered and Threatened Species by Calendar Year https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-listings-by-year-totals ( annual data through 2022 ); Listed Species Summary (Boxscore) https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/boxscore ( cumulative data up to September 18, 2023, and annual data for coral ); Delisted Species https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-delisted ( delisted data through 2022 )

Eventually, though, “climate change is going to swamp the ESA,” says J. B. Ruhl, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been writing about the problem for decades. “As more and more species are threatened, I don't know what the agency does with that.” To offer a practical answer, in a 2008 paper he urged the FWS to aggressively identify the species most at risk and not waste resources on ones that seem sure to expire.

Yet when I asked Frazer which urgent issues were commanding his attention right now, his first thought wasn't climate; it was renewable energy. “Renewable energy is going to leave a big footprint on the planet and on our country,” he says, some of it threatening plants and animals if not implemented well. “The Inflation Reduction Act is going to lead to an explosion of more wind and solar across the landscape.

Long before President Joe Biden signed that landmark law, conflicts were proliferating: Desert Tortoise versus solar farms in the Mojave Desert, Golden Eagles versus wind farms in Wyoming, Tiehm's Buckwheat (a little desert flower) versus lithium mining in Nevada. The mine case is a close parallel to that of Snail Darters versus the Tellico Dam. The flower, listed as endangered just last year, grows on only a few acres of mountainside in western Nevada, right where a mining company wants to extract lithium. The Center for Biological Diversity has led the fight to save it. Elsewhere in Nevada people have used the ESA to stop, for the moment, a proposed geothermal plant that might threaten the two-inch Dixie Valley Toad, discovered in 2017 and also declared endangered last year.

Does an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species make sense in such places? In a recent essay entitled “A Time for Triage,” Columbia law professor Michael Gerrard argues that “the environmental community has trade-off denial. We don't recognize that it's too late to preserve everything we consider precious.” In his view, given the urgency of building the infrastructure to fight climate change, we need to be willing to let a species go after we've done our best to save it. Environmental lawyers adept at challenging fossil-fuel projects, using the ESA and other statutes, should consider holding their fire against renewable installations. “Just because you have bullets doesn't mean you shoot them in every direction,” Gerrard says. “You pick your targets.” In the long run, he and others argue, climate change poses a bigger threat to wildlife than wind turbines and solar farms do.

For now habitat loss remains the overwhelming threat. What's truly needed to preserve the U.S.'s wondrous biodiversity, both Stein and Ruhl say, is a national network of conserved ecosystems. That won't be built with our present politics. But two more practical initiatives might help.

The first is the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, which narrowly missed passage in 2022 and has been reintroduced this year. It builds on the success of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, which funds state wildlife agencies through a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition. That law was adopted to address a decline in game species that had hunters alarmed. The state refuges and other programs it funded are why deer, ducks and Wild Turkeys are no longer scarce.

The recovery act would provide $1.3 billion a year to states and nearly $100 million to Native American tribes to conserve nongame species. It has bipartisan support, in part, Stein says, because it would help arrest the decline of a species before the ESA's “regulatory hammer” falls. Although it would be a large boost to state wildlife budgets, the funding would be a rounding error in federal spending. But last year Congress couldn't agree on how to pay for the measure. Passage “would be a really big deal for nature,” Curry says.

Oyster Mussel. Epioblasma capsaeformis. Listed as Endangered: 1997. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The second initiative that could promote species conservation is already underway: bringing landowners into the fold. Most wildlife habitat east of the Rocky Mountains is on private land. That's also where habitat loss is happening fastest. Some experts say conservation isn't likely to succeed unless the FWS works more collaboratively with landowners, adding carrots to the ESA's regulatory stick. Bean has long promoted the idea, including when he worked at the Interior Department from 2009 to early 2017. The approach started, he says, with the Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

When the ESA was passed, there were fewer than 10,000 Red-cockaded Woodpeckers left of the millions that had once lived in the Southeast. Humans had cut down the old pine trees, chiefly Longleaf Pine, that the birds excavate cavities in for roosting and nesting. An appropriate tree has to be large, at least 60 to 80 years old, and there aren't many like that left. The longleaf forest, which once carpeted up to 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas, has been reduced to less than three million acres of fragments.

In the 1980s the ESA wasn't helping because it provided little incentive to preserve forest on private land. In fact, Bean says, it did the opposite: landowners would sometimes clear-cut potential woodpecker habitat just to avoid the law's constraints. The woodpecker population continued to drop until the 1990s. That's when Bean and his Environmental Defense Fund colleagues persuaded the FWS to adopt “safe-harbor agreements” as a simple solution. An agreement promised landowners that if they let pines grow older or took other woodpecker-friendly measures, they wouldn't be punished; they remained free to decide later to cut the forest back to the baseline condition it had been in when the agreement was signed.

That modest carrot was inducement enough to quiet the chainsaws in some places. “The downward trends have been reversed,” Bean says. “In places like South Carolina, where they have literally hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned forest enrolled, Red-cockaded Woodpecker numbers have shot up dramatically.”

The woodpecker is still endangered. It still needs help. Because there aren't enough old pines, land managers are inserting lined, artificial cavities into younger trees and sometimes moving birds into them to expand the population. They are also using prescribed fires or power tools to keep the longleaf understory open and grassy, the way fires set by lightning or Indigenous people once kept it and the way the woodpeckers like it. Most of this work is taking place, and most Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are still living, on state or federal land such as military bases. But a lot more longleaf must be restored to get the birds delisted, which means collaborating with private landowners, who own 80 percent of the habitat.

Leo Miranda-Castro, who retired last December as director of the FWS's southeast region, says the collaborative approach took hold at regional headquarters in Atlanta in 2010. The Center for Biological Diversity had dropped a “mega petition” demanding that the FWS consider 404 new species for listing. The volume would have been “overwhelming,” Miranda-Castro says. “That's when we decided, ‘Hey, we cannot do this in the traditional way.’ The fear of listing so many species was a catalyst” to look for cases where conservation work might make a listing unnecessary.

An agreement affecting the Gopher Tortoise shows what is possible. Like the woodpeckers, it is adapted to open-canopied longleaf forests, where it basks in the sun, feeds on herbaceous plants and digs deep burrows in the sandy soil. The tortoise is a keystone species: more than 300 other animals, including snakes, foxes and skunks, shelter in its burrows. But its numbers have been declining for decades.

Urbanization is the main threat to the tortoises, but timberland can be managed in a way that leaves room for them. Eager to keep the species off the list, timber companies, which own 20 million acres in its range, agreed to figure out how to do that—above all by returning fire to the landscape and keeping the canopy open. One timber company, Resource Management Service, said it would restore Longleaf Pine on about 3,700 acres in the Florida panhandle, perhaps expanding to 200,000 acres eventually. It even offered to bring other endangered species onto its land, which delighted Miranda-Castro: “I had never heard about that happening before.” Last fall the FWS announced that the tortoise didn't need to be listed in most of its range.

Miranda-Castro now directs Conservation Without Conflict, an organization that seeks to foster conversation and negotiation in settings where the ESA has more often generated litigation. “For the first 50 years the stick has been used the most,” Miranda-Castro says. “For the next 50 years we're going to be using the carrots way more.” On his own farm outside Fort Moore, Ga., he grows Longleaf Pine—and Gopher Tortoises are benefiting.

Whooping Crane. Grus americana. Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The Center for Biological Diversity doubts that carrots alone will save the reptile. It points out that the FWS's own models show small subpopulations vanishing over the next few decades and the total population falling by nearly a third. In August 2023 it filed suit against the FWS, demanding the Gopher Tortoise be listed.

The FWS itself resorted to the stick this year when it listed the Lesser Prairie-Chicken, a bird whose grassland home in the Southern Plains has long been encroached on by agriculture and the energy industry. The Senate promptly voted to overturn that listing, but President Biden promised to veto that measure if it passes the House.

B ehind the debates over strategy lurks the vexing question: Can we save all species? The answer is no. Extinctions will keep happening. In 2021 the FWS proposed to delist 23 more species—not because they had recovered but because they hadn't been seen in decades and were presumed gone. There is a difference, though, between acknowledging the reality of extinction and deliberately deciding to let a species go. Some people are willing to do the latter; others are not. Bean thinks a person's view has a lot to do with how much they've been exposed to wildlife, especially as a child.

Zygmunt Plater, a professor emeritus at Boston College Law School, was the attorney in the 1978 Snail Darter case, fighting for hundreds of farmers whose land would be submerged by the Tellico Dam. At one point in the proceedings Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., asked him, “What purpose is served, if any, by these little darters? Are they used for food?” Plater thinks creatures such as the darter alert us to the threat our actions pose to them and to ourselves. They prompt us to consider alternatives.

The ESA aims to save species, but for that to happen, ecosystems have to be preserved. Protecting the Northern Spotted Owl has saved at least a small fraction of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. Concern about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Gopher Tortoise is aiding the preservation of longleaf forests in the Southeast. The Snail Darter wasn't enough to stop the Tellico Dam, which drowned historic Cherokee sites and 300 farms, mostly for real estate development. But after the controversy, the presence of a couple of endangered mussels did help dissuade the TVA from completing yet another dam, on the Duck River in central Tennessee. That river is now recognized as one of the most biodiverse in North America.

The ESA forced states to take stock of the wildlife they harbored, says Jim Williams, who as a young biologist with the FWS was responsible for listing both the Snail Darter and mussels in the Duck River. Williams grew up in Alabama, where I live. “We didn't know what the hell we had,” he says. “People started looking around and found all sorts of new species.” Many were mussels and little fish. In a 2002 survey, Stein found that Alabama ranked fifth among U.S. states in species diversity. It also ranks second-highest for extinctions; of the 23 extinct species the FWS recently proposed for delisting, eight were mussels, and seven of those were found in Alabama.

One morning this past spring, at a cabin on the banks of Shoal Creek in northern Alabama, I attended a kind of jamboree of local freshwater biologists. At the center of the action, in the shade of a second-floor deck, sat Sartore. He had come to board more species onto his photo ark, and the biologists—most of them from the TVA—were only too glad to help, fanning out to collect critters to be decanted into Sartore's narrow, flood-lit aquarium. He sat hunched before it, a black cloth draped over his head and camera, snapping away like a fashion photographer, occasionally directing whoever was available to prod whatever animal was in the tank into a more artful pose.

As I watched, he photographed a striated darter that didn't yet have a name, a Yellow Bass, an Orangefin Shiner and a giant crayfish discovered in 2011 in the very creek we were at. Sartore's goal is to help people who never meet such creatures feel the weight of extinction—and to have a worthy remembrance of the animals if they do vanish from Earth.

With TVA biologist Todd Amacker, I walked down to the creek and sat on the bank. Amacker is a mussel specialist, following in Williams's footsteps. As his colleagues waded in the shoals with nets, he gave me a quick primer on mussel reproduction. Their peculiar antics made me care even more about their survival.

There are hundreds of freshwater mussel species, Amacker explained, and almost every one tricks a particular species of fish into raising its larvae. The Wavy-rayed Lampmussel, for example, extrudes part of its flesh in the shape of a minnow to lure black bass—and then squirts larvae into the bass's open mouth so they can latch on to its gills and fatten on its blood. Another mussel dangles its larvae at the end of a yard-long fishing line of mucus. The Duck River Darter Snapper—a member of a genus that has already lost most of its species to extinction—lures and then clamps its shell shut on the head of a hapless fish, inoculating it with larvae. “You can't make this up,” Amacker said. Each relationship has evolved over the ages in a particular place.

The small band of biologists who are trying to cultivate the endangered mussels in labs must figure out which fish a particular mussel needs. It's the type of tedious trial-and-error work conservation biologists call “heroic,” the kind that helped to save California Condors and Whooping Cranes. Except these mussels are eyeless, brainless, little brown creatures that few people have ever heard of.

For most mussels, conditions are better now than half a century ago, Amacker said. But some are so rare it's hard to imagine they can be saved. I asked Amacker whether it was worth the effort or whether we just need to accept that we must let some species go. The catch in his voice almost made me regret the question.

“I'm not going to tell you it's not worth the effort,” he said. “It's more that there's no hope for them.” He paused, then collected himself. “Who are we to be the ones responsible for letting a species die?” he went on. “They've been around so long. That's not my answer as a biologist; that's my answer as a human. Who are we to make it happen?”

Robert Kunzig is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala., and a former senior editor at National Geographic, Discover and Scientific American .

Scientific American Magazine Vol 329 Issue 4

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Wildlife conservation.

Wildlife conservation aims to protect plant and animal species as the human population encroaches on their resources.

Biology, Ecology, Conservation, Storytelling, Photography

Asian Elephant Family

Filmmakers and photographers are essential to conservation efforts. They take the photographs, such as these Asian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus), and the films that interest others in protecting wildlife.

Photograph by Nuttaya Maneekhot

Wildlife conservation is the practice of protecting plant and animal species and their habitats . Wildlife is integral to the world’s ecosystems , providing balance and stability to nature’s processes. The goal of wildlife conservation is to ensure the survival of these species, and to educate people on living sustainably with other species. The human population has grown exponentially over the past 200 years, to more than eight billion humans as of November 2022, and it continues to rapidly grow. This means natural resources are being consumed faster than ever by the billions of people on the planet. This growth and development also endangers the habitats and existence of various types of wildlife around the world, particularly animals and plants that may be displaced for land development, or used for food or other human purposes. Other threats to wildlife include the introduction of invasive species from other parts of the world, climate change, pollution, hunting, fishing, and poaching. National and international organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the United Nations, and National Geographic, itself, work to support global animal and habitat conservation efforts on many different fronts. They work with the government to establish and protect public lands, like national parks and wildlife refuges . They help write legislation, such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 in the United States, to protect various species. They work with law enforcement to prosecute wildlife crimes, like wildlife trafficking and illegal hunting (poaching). They also promote biodiversity to support the growing human population while preserving existing species and habitats. National Geographic Explorers, like conservation biologists Camille Coudrat and Titus Adhola, are working to slow the extinction of global species and to protect global biodiversity and habitats. Environmental filmmakers and photographers, like Thomas P. Peschak and Joel Sartore, are essential to conservation efforts as well, documenting and bringing attention to endangered wildlife all over the world.

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Related Resources

Conservation

In defense of biodiversity: why protecting species from extinction matters.

By Carl Safina • February 12, 2018

A number of biologists have recently made the argument that extinction is part of evolution and that saving species need not be a conservation priority. But this revisionist thinking shows a lack of understanding of evolution and an ignorance of the natural world.

A few years ago, I helped lead a ship-based expedition along south Alaska during which several scientists and noted artists documented and made art from the voluminous plastic trash that washes ashore even there. At Katmai National Park, we packed off several tons of trash from as distant as South Asia. But what made Katmai most memorable was: huge brown bears. Mothers and cubs were out on the flats digging clams. Others were snoozing on dunes. Others were patrolling.

During a rest, several of us were sitting on an enormous drift-log, watching one mother who’d been clamming with three cubs. As the tide flooded the flat, we watched in disbelief as she brought her cubs up to where we were sitting — and stepped up on the log we were on. There was no aggression, no tension; she was relaxed. We gave her some room as she paused on the log, and then she took her cubs past us into a sedge meadow. Because she was so calm, I felt no fear. I felt the gift.

In this protected refuge, bears could afford a generous view of humans. Whoever protected this land certainly had my gratitude.

In the early 20th century, a botanist named Robert F. Griggs discovered Katmai’s volcanic “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.” In love with the area, he spearheaded efforts to preserve the region’s wonders and wildlife. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson established Katmai National Monument (now Katmai National Park and Preserve ), protecting 1,700 square miles, thus ensuring a home for bear cubs born a century later, and making possible my indelible experience that day. As a legacy for Griggs’ proclivity to share his love of living things, George Washington University later established the Robert F. Griggs Chair in Biology.

That chair is now occupied by a young professor whose recent writing probably has Griggs spinning in his grave. He is R. Alexander Pyron . A few months ago, The Washington Post published a “ Perspective” piece by Pyron that is an extreme example of a growing minority opinion in the conservation community, one that might be summarized as, “Humans are profoundly altering the planet, so let’s just make peace with the degradation of the natural world.”

No biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron’s essay – with lines such as, “The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings” and “[T]he impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency” – left the impression that it was written in a conservative think tank, perhaps by one of the anti-regulatory zealots now filling posts throughout the Trump administration. Pyron’s sentiments weren’t merely oddly out of keeping with the legacy of the man whose name graces his job title. Much of what Pyron wrote is scientifically inaccurate. And where he stepped out of his field into ethics, what he wrote was conceptually confused.

Pyron has since posted, on his website and Facebook page, 1,100 words of frantic backpedaling that land somewhere between apology and retraction, including mea culpas that he “sensationalized” parts of his own argument and “cavalierly glossed over several complex issues.” But Pyron’s original essay and his muddled apology do not change the fact that the beliefs he expressed reflect a disturbing trend that has taken hold among segments of the conservation community. And his article comes at a time when conservation is being assailed from other quarters, with a half-century of federal protections of land being rolled back, the Endangered Species Act now more endangered than ever, and the relationship between extinction and evolution being subjected to confused, book-length mistreatment.

Pyron’s original opinion piece, so clear and unequivocal in its assertions, is a good place to unpack and disentangle accelerating misconceptions about the “desirability” of extinction that are starting to pop up like hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In recent years, some biologists and writers have been distancing themselves from conservation’s bedrock idea that in an increasingly human-dominated world we must find ways to protect and perpetuate natural beauty, wild places, and the living endowment of the planet. In their stead, we are offered visions of human-dominated landscapes in which the stresses of destruction and fragmentation spur evolution.

White rhinoceros ( Ceratotherium simum ). Source: Herman Pijpers/ Flickr

Conservation International ditched its exuberant tropical forest graphic for a new corporate logo whose circle and line were designed to suggest a human head and outstretched arms. A few years ago, Peter Kareiva, then chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said , “conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness,” for “a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.” Human annihilation of the passenger pigeon, he wrote, caused “no catastrophic or even measurable effects,” characterizing the total extinction of the hemisphere’s most abundant bird — whose population went from billions to zero inside a century (certainly a “measurable effect” in itself) — as an example of nature’s “resilience.”

British ecologist Chris Thomas’s recent book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, argues that the destruction of nature creates opportunities for evolution of new lifeforms that counterbalance any losses we create, an idea that is certainly optimistic considering the burgeoning lists of endangered species. Are we really ready to consider that disappearing rhinos are somehow counterbalanced by a new subspecies of daisy in a railroad track? Maybe it would be simpler if Thomas and his comrades just said, “We don’t care about nature.’’

Enter Pyron, who — at least in his initial essay — basically said he doesn’t. He’s entitled to his apathy, but no biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron began with a resonant story about his nocturnal rediscovery of a South American frog that had been thought recently extinct. He and colleagues collected several that, he reassured us, “are now breeding safely in captivity.” As we breathed a sigh of relief, Pyron added, “But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it.”

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable spurred the founding of the conservation movement.

I happen to be writing this in the Peruvian Amazon, having just returned from a night walk to a light-trap where I helped a biologist collect moths. No one yet knows how many species live here. Moths are important pollinators. Knowing them helps detangle a little bit of how this rainforest works. So it’s a good night to mention that the number of species in an area carries the technical term “species richness.” More is richer, and fewer is, indeed, poorer. Pyron’s view lies outside scientific consensus and societal values.

Pyron wasn’t concerned about his frogs going extinct, because, “Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.” But the timescale would be millennia at best — meaningless in human terms — and perhaps never; hundreds of amphibians worldwide are suffering declines and extinctions, raising the possibility that major lineages and whole groups of species will vanish. Pyron seemed to have no concerns about that possibility, writing, “Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years.”

But that’s misleading. “Periodically” implies regularity. There’s no regularity to mass extinctions. Not in their timing, nor in their causes. The mass extinctions are not related. Three causes of mass extinctions — prolonged worldwide atmosphere-altering volcanic eruptions; a dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit; and the spreading agriculture, settlement, and sheer human appetite driving extinctions today — are unrelated.

Rio Pescado stubfoot toad ( Atelopus balios ). Source: De Investigación y Conservación de Anfibios/ Flickr

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable, and could be lessened or avoided, spurred the founding of the conservation movement and created the discipline of conservation biology.

But Pyron seems unmoved. “Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish,” he declared. “Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species.”

Let us unpack. Extinction is not evolution’s driver; survival is. The engine of evolution is survival amidst competition. It’s a little like what drives innovation in business. To see this, let’s simply compare the species diversity of the Northern Hemisphere, where periodic ice sheets largely wiped the slate clean, with those of the tropics, where the evolutionary time clock continued running throughout. A couple of acres in eastern temperate North America might have a dozen tree species or fewer. In the Amazon a similar area can have 300 tree species. All of North American has 1,400 species of trees; Brazil has 8,800. All of North America has just over 900 birds; Colombia has 1,900 species. All of North America has 722 butterfly species. Where I am right now, along the Tambopata River in Peru, biologists have tallied around 1,200 butterfly species.

Competition among living species drives proliferation into diversified specialties. Specialists increasingly exploit narrowing niches. We can think of this as a marketplace of life, where little competition necessitates little specialization, thus little proliferation. An area with many types of trees, for instance, directly causes the evolution of many types of highly specialized pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and pollinating bats, who visit only the “right” trees. Many flowering plants are pollinated by just one specialized species.

Pyron muddles several kinds of extinctions, then serves up further misunderstanding of how evolution works. So let’s clarify. Mass extinctions are global; they involve the whole planet. There have been five mass extinctions and we’ve created a sixth . Past mass extinctions happened when the entire planet became more hostile. Regional wipeouts, as occurred during the ice ages, are not considered mass extinctions, even though many species can go extinct. Even without these major upheavals there are always a few species blinking out due to environmental changes or new competitors. And there are pseudo-extinctions where old forms no longer exist, but only because their descendants have changed through time.

New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. They evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change.

Crucially for understanding the relationship between extinction and evolution is this: New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. New species evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change. Many “extinct” species never really died out; they just changed into what lives now. Not all the dinosaurs went extinct; theropod dinosaurs survived. They no longer exist because they evolved into what we call birds. Australopithecines no longer exist, but they did not all go extinct. Their children morphed into the genus Homo, and the tool- and fire-making Homo erectus may well have survived to become us. If they indeed are our direct ancestor — as some species was — they are gone now, but no more “extinct” than our own childhood. All species come from ancestors, in lineages that have survived.

Pyron’s contention that the “hardiest” flourish is a common misconception. A sloth needs to be slow; a faster sloth is going to wind up as dinner in a harpy eagle nest. A white bear is not “hardier” than a brown one; the same white fur that provides camouflage in a snowy place will scare away prey in green meadow. Bears with genes for white fur flourished in the Arctic, while brown bears did well amidst tundra and forests. Polar bears evolved from brown bears of the tundra; they got so specialized that they separated, then specialized further. Becoming a species is a process, not an event. “New” species are simply specialized descendants of old species.

True extinctions beget nothing. Humans have recently sped the extinction rate by about a thousand times compared to the fossil record. The fact that the extinction of dinosaurs was followed, over tens of millions of years, by a proliferation of mammals, is irrelevant to present-day decisions about rhinos, elephant populations, or monarch butterflies. Pyron’s statement, “There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species,” is like saying there are no endangered children except for all children. It’s like answering “Black lives matter” with “All lives matter.” It’s a way of intentionally missing the point.

Chestnut-sided warbler ( Setophaga pensylvanica ). Source: Francesco Veronesi/ Wikimedia

Here’s the point: All life today represents non-extinctions; each species, every living individual, is part of a lineage that has not gone extinct in a billion years.

Pyron also expressed the opinion that “the only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves …” I don’t know of another biologist who shares this opinion. Pyron’s statement makes little practical sense, because reducing the diversity and abundance of the living world will rob human generations of choices, as values change. Save the passenger pigeon? Too late for that. Whales? A few people acted in time to keep most of them. Elephants? Our descendants will either revile or revere us for what we do while we have the planet’s reins in our hands for a few minutes. We are each newly arrived and temporary tourists on this planet, yet we find ourselves custodians of the world for all people yet unborn. A little humility, and forbearance, might comport.

Thus Pyron’s most jarring assertion: “Extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.” That statement is a stranger to thousands of years of philosophy on moral agency and reveals an ignorance of human moral thinking. Moral agency issues from an ability to consider consequences. Humans are the species most capable of such consideration. Thus many philosophers consider humans the only creatures capable of acting as moral agents. An asteroid strike, despite its consequences, has no moral significance. Protecting bears by declaring Katmai National Monument, or un-protecting Bears Ears National Monument, are acts of moral agency. Ending genetic lineages millions of years old, either actively or by the willful neglect that Pyron advocates, certainly qualifies as morally significant.

Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter?” Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them?

How can we even decide which species we “directly depend’’ upon? We don’t directly depend on peacocks or housecats, leopards or leopard frogs, humpback whales or hummingbirds or chestnut-sided warblers or millions of others. Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter,” as Pyron seemed to advocate? Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them? I happen not to view my dogs as food, for instance. Things we “rely on” make life possible, sure, but the things we don’t need make life worthwhile.

When Pyron wrote, “Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves… If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it,” he expressed a dereliction of the love, fascination, and perspective that motivates the practice of biology.

Here is a real biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection:

I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course … with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty… . This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man… . Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone. —The Malay Archipelago, 1869

At the opposite pole of Wallace’s human insight and wonder, Pyron asked us to become complicit in extinction. “The goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct,” he asserted. “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species … The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”

African elephant ( Loxodonta africana ). Source: Flowcomm/ Flickr

Right now, in the Amazon as I type, listening to nocturnal birds and bugs and frogs in this towering emerald cathedral of life, thinking such as Pyron’s strikes me as failing to grasp both the living world and the human spirit.

The massive destruction that Pyron seems to so cavalierly accept isn’t necessary. When I was a kid, there were no ospreys, no bald eagles, no peregrine falcons left around New York City and Long Island where I lived. DDT and other hard pesticides were erasing them from the world. A small handful of passionate people sued to get those pesticides banned, others began breeding captive falcons for later release, and one biologist brought osprey eggs to nests of toxically infertile parents to keep faltering populations on life support. These projects succeeded. All three of these species have recovered spectacularly and now again nest near my Long Island home. Extinction wasn’t a cost of progress; it was an unnecessary cost of carelessness. Humans could work around the needs of these birds, and these creatures could exist around development. But it took some thinking, some hard work, and some tinkering.

It’s not that anyone thinks humans have not greatly changed the world, or will stop changing it. Rather, as the great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac , “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

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Protecting wildlife

The world’s wildlife is being lost up to 10,000 times faster than the natural extinction rate.

Animals and plants aren’t just valuable for their own sake – they’re also part of a wider natural environment that may provide food, shelter, water, and other functions, for other wildlife and people.

With so much wildlife at risk, the question people often ask us is how do we decide which animals and plants to focus our conservation efforts and funds on? Well, it’s not always an easy decision… but we do have criteria to guide us.

For example: 1) is it a species that’s a vital part of a food chain? Or 2) a species that helps demonstrate broader conservation needs? Or 3) is it an important cultural icon that will garner support for wildlife conservation as a whole? These are just some of the considerations.

"Our planet is so special and diverse there are still new species being discovered all the time. Meanwhile we’ve reported the terrifying news that vertebrate species populations have declined on average by over 50% since 1970. Whether your interest in wildlife is for its own intrinsic value or for its contribution to a functioning ecosystem that supports so many species as well as human livelihoods and well-being too, there is no denying that we, people, have an obligation to ensure we not only stop our damaging ways, but look to increase wildlife populations and strengthen the habitats they rely on."

Over the past five decades, our field work has helped bring several iconic animals back from the brink of extinction – including white and greater one-horned rhinos, certain populations of African elephants, mountain gorillas, giant pandas and tigers.

We’ve also achieved important policy changes – for instance: helping bring about the global moratorium on commercial whaling; improving controls for trade in threatened species such as tigers; and regulating trade in over used trees, like mahogany, and fish such as sturgeons (caught for caviar).

Our work hasn’t just given a more certain future for specific wildlife, but has helped thousands more species by contributing to the conservation of all the diversity of life within their environments.

Our wildlife conservation efforts are also directly helping people, through improved livelihoods, food security, access to fresh water, incomes, and by strengthening communities, socially and politically.

The work we do is playing a part in at least five of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, and contributing to poverty reduction in several parts of the world.

Global wild tiger numbers increase for first time in conservation history

Thanks to the collective efforts by governments and organisations, and the brilliant help of our passionate supporters and colleagues around the world, we were thrilled to see that wild tiger numbers have risen – for the first time in conservation history. Just over a century ago, there were thought to be around 100,000 wild tigers. In the past century, we lost nearly 95% of our wild tigers. By 2010 there were as few as 3,200 left in the wild (to put that in perspective, there are more tigers than this in captivity in the US alone). But due to enthusiastic and determined global efforts, and skilled conservation work on the ground in Asia, wild tiger numbers have now risen to an estimate of around 3,900. We’re stepping up our efforts to help wild tiger populations grow further – and you can help us.

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How we're protecting wildlife

Supporting people to support snow leopards

We’re working with communities in the high mountains of China, India and Nepal to help protect snow leopards and other wildlife.

Sound of Safety

We’re working with WWF India and WWF Pakistan to protect river dolphins while improving livelihoods for local fishing communities.

Illegal Wildlife Trade in Nepal

Reducing wildlife trade in Bagmati province, Nepal.

Sustainable fisheries in the Mara wetlands

The UK Government’s Darwin Initiative, funds WWF collaborative work with local partners on sustainable fisheries management in Mara wetlands, Tanzania.

Tackling human-wildlife conflict in Ruvuma

With funding from the UK Government’s Darwin Initiative, WWF is collaborating with local partners to reduce human-wildlife conflict in Ruvuma.

Conserving Otters in the Karnali

Strengthening communities’ livelihood and stewardship to conserve Otters in the Karnali.

Making palm oil sustainable

WWF Malaysia works with plantations to help the endangered Borneo elephant move freely.

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Essay on Save Animals

Wildlife is a precious gift from God for this planet. The term "fauna" is not only for wild animals but also for all non-domesticated life forms including birds, insects, plants, fungi and even microscopic organisms. To maintain a healthy ecological balance on this land, animals, plants and marine species are as important as humans. Every organism on this earth has a unique place in the food chain that contributes to the ecosystem in its own way. But, unfortunately today, many animals and birds are endangered.

Natural habitats of animals and plants are destroyed for land development and agriculture by humans. Poaching and hunting of animals for fur, jewellery, meat and leather are other important factors contributing to the extinction of wildlife. If soon, no rigorous measures are taken to save the fauna, it would not be long when they find a place on the list of extinct species. And that would not be all! The extinction of wild species will certainly have a fatal impact on the human race. So, for us as human beings, it becomes a great responsibility to save the wildlife, our planet and, most importantly, ourselves. Here are some other reasons for deep understanding why wildlife plays such an important role in maintaining an ecological balance on Earth.

The ecosystem is entirely based on the relationships between different organisms linked by food webs and food chains. Even if a single wild species dies out of the ecosystem, it can disrupt the entire food chain and lead to disastrous results. Consider a simple example of a bee that is vital for the growth of some crops because of their pollen transport roles. If bees are reduced in number, the growth of food crops would decrease significantly due to lack of pollination.

Similarly, if a species becomes larger, it may again have a negative effect on the ecological balance. Consider another simple case of carnivores that is shrinking every day because of human poaching and hunting. The reduction of these carnivores leads to an increase in the number of herbivores that depend on forest vegetation for their survival. It would not be long, when the number of herbivores in the forests would rise to such an extent that they would move to farmland and villages for their food needs. Thus, saving wildlife plays a big role in controlling the ecological balance, maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

The human population depends largely on agricultural crops and plants for their food needs. Do you know that wildlife plays an important role in the growth of these crops? If not, we will understand the concept. The fruits and vegetables that we get from plants are the result of a process called pollination, a reproductive system in plants where the pollen grains of the male flower are transferred to the female flower, resulting in the production of seeds. Now, for pollination to occur, birds, bees and insects, some of the smallest species on this planet, play an important role. It is through these insects and birds that pollens are transferred between the flowers as they pass from one flower to another. Crop growth can be significantly affected if the number of birds and insects carried by the pollen decreases in number for any reason. You would be surprised to know that 90% of the world's apple production depends on the pollination of bees.

In addition to pollination, many birds also play an important role in pest control by feeding on them.

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Essay on Animals: Samples in 100, 200 and 300 Words

Updated on
Dec 27, 2023

Animals are an important part of the natural world. Their existence in our environment is as important as ours. Some of the common animals that we see regularly are dogs, cats, cows, birds, etc. From small insects to blue whales, there are millions of species of animals in our environment, each having their habitat and way of living. Some animals live in seas, while others on land. Our natural environment is so diverse that there are more than 7 million species of animals currently living. Today, we will provide you with some essay on animals. Stay tuned!

Table of Contents

1 Essay on Animals in 100 Words
2 Essay on Animals in 200 Words
3 Essay on Animals in 300 Words

Also Read: Essay on New Education Policy in 500 Words

Essay on Animals in 100 Words

Animals are part of our natural world. Most of the animal specials are related to humans in direct or indirect ways. In agricultural and dairy production, animals play an important role. Our food, such as eggs, milk, chicken, beef, mutton, fish, etc. all come from animals. Animals are generally of two types; domestic and wild.

Domestic animals are those that we can keep at our homes or use their physical strength for activities like agriculture, farming, etc. Wild animals live in forests, where they have different ways of survival. There is an interdependence between humans and animals. Without animals, our existence would be impossible. Therefore, saving animals is as important as saving ourselves.

Also Read: Essay on Cow: 100 to 500 Words

Essay on Animals in 200 Words

Animals play a major role in maintaining the balance of our ecosystem. They contribute to our biodiversity by enriching the environment with their diverse species. Animals range from microscopic organisms to majestic mammals with their unique place in the intricate web of life.

Animals provide essential ecosystem services, such as pollination, seed dispersal, and pest control, which are vital for the survival of many plant species. Animals contribute to nutrient cycling and help in maintaining the health of ecosystems. Animals have an interdependency on each other which creates a delicate equilibrium. Our activities often disturb his balance, which affects the entire ecosystem.

There are a lot of animals that we can domesticate, such as dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc. These animals bring joy and companionship to our lives. We also domesticate milch animals, such as cows, goats, camels, etc. for services like milk or agricultural activities. Wild animals living in forests contribute to our cultural and aesthetic aspects, inspiring art, literature, and folklore.

In recent years, animal species have faced threats due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human activities. Conservation efforts are crucial to protecting endangered species and preserving the diversity of life on Earth.

Animals are integral to the health of our planet and contribute to the overall well-being of human societies. It is our responsibility to appreciate, respect, and conserve the rich tapestry of animal life for the benefit of present and future generations.

Essay on Animals in 300 Words

Scientific studies say there are 4 types of animals; mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. All these types of animals are important in maintaining the balance of our ecosystem. From the smallest insects to the largest mammals, each species has a unique role to play in the web of life.

One of the fundamental roles of animals is in ecosystem services. Bees and butterflies, for example, are crucial pollinators for many plants, including crops that humans rely on for food. Birds and mammals contribute to seed dispersal, facilitating the growth of various plant species. Predators help control the population of prey animals, preventing overgrazing and maintaining the health of ecosystems.

Beyond their ecological contributions, animals also have immense cultural significance. Throughout history, animals have been revered and represented in art, mythology, and religious beliefs. They symbolize traits such as strength, agility, wisdom, and loyalty, becoming integral to human culture. Domesticated animals, such as dogs and cats, have been companions to humans for thousands of years, providing emotional support and companionship.

However, the impact of human activities on animals is a growing concern. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and poaching pose significant threats to many species. Conservation efforts are crucial to safeguarding biodiversity and ensuring the survival of endangered animals.

Moreover, the well-being of animals is closely linked to human welfare. Livestock and poultry contribute to the global food supply, and advancements in medical research often rely on animal models. Ethical considerations surrounding animal welfare are increasingly important, leading to discussions on responsible and humane treatment.

Animals are essential components of our planet’s ecosystems and contribute significantly to human culture and well-being. Balancing our interactions with animals through conservation, ethical treatment, and sustainable practices is imperative to ensure a harmonious coexistence and preserve the diversity of life on Earth.

Tree: trimmed. ✔ Goats are skilled climbers who don't limit their search for food to the ground. #goat #greatestholidayofalltime #Morocco pic.twitter.com/eQrwHPWSPr — Animal Planet (@AnimalPlanet) December 19, 2023

Ans: Animals are an important part of our natural environment. Humans and animals depend on each other for their survival. We humans depend on animals for food, agricultural activities, etc. Domestic animals are those that we can keep at our homes or use their physical strength for activities like agriculture, farming, etc. Wild animals live in forests, where they have different ways of survival. There is an interdependence between humans and animals. Without animals, our existence would be impossible. Therefore, saving animals is as important as saving ourselves.

Ans: Some of the domesticated animals are dogs, cats, cows, goats, camels, etc.

Ans: Mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

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Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Get your favorite articles delivered right to your inbox, these 5 stories of amazing times wild animals who helped humans in need will leave you awe-struck, by aisling maria cronin.

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Domestic animals have often been known to help their human companions from danger. From the quick thinking of Duke , the dog who alerted his guardians to their baby’s need for urgent medical attention, to the smart actions of service dog Yolanda – who rescued her vision-impaired human from a house fire by dialing 911 – there are many animals out there who have reason earned the eternal gratitude of their human friends.

However, it is truly astonishing to hear about undomesticated animals who are compelled to rush in and save the day, when they have had little to no prior experience with humans. Prepare to be amazed by the stories of these wild animals who – without any apparent reason – stepped in and helped humans from imminent death.

1. Three Lions Save Girl from Kidnappers

Source: Benh LIEU SONG/Flickr

In June 2005, a twelve-year-old girl was snatched by four men in rural south-west Ethiopia as she made her way home from school. A week after the kidnapping, her captors were attempting to move her, with police in hot pursuit, when three lions chased the men off. The lions remained with the terrified girl until police officers arrived to escort her to safety. She told them that although she had been beaten by her kidnappers – who it is believed had been attempting to sell her into a forced marriage – the lions had not touched her.

Sergeant Wondmu Wedaj said , “They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest. Everyone thinks this is some kind of miracle because normally the lions would attack people.” An Ethiopian wildlife expert claimed that the lions may have spared the girl because her cries had sounded like the mewing of a cub.

2. Pod of Dolphins Protect Lifeguard and Family From Shark Attack

Source: Tory Kallman / Shutterstock

In late 2004, lifeguard Rob Howes and his family were out swimming at Ocean Beach, near Whangarei, New Zealand, when seven bottlenose dolphins approached and herded them together.

“They were behaving really weird,” Howes recalled , “turning tight circles on us, and slapping the water with their tails.” He and his daughter’s friend Helen had drifted about twenty meters away from his daughter and another friend before a dolphin swam straight at them and dived back down into the water before them. “I turned in the water to see where it was going to come up,” Howes went on, “but instead I saw this great big grey fish (later revealed to be a great white shark) swim around me. It glided in an arc and headed for the other two girls. My heart went into my mouth because one of them was my daughter. The dolphins were going ballistic.”

The dolphins then herded the swimmers together and circled protectively around them for another forty minutes, fending off the shark .

Dr. Rochelle Constantine from the Auckland University School of Biological Science said , “From my understanding of the behavior of these dolphins, they certainly were acting in a way which indicated the shark posed a threat to something. Dolphins are known for helping helpless things . It is an altruistic response and bottlenose dolphins in particular are known for it.”

3. Sea Lion Saves Man Who Jumped Off Golden Gate Bridge

Source: Longjourneys / Shutterstock

California resident Kevin Hines knows that he is lucky to be alive after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, during a severe bout of mental illness: “Here are the facts: on September 25th, 2000, due to bipolar disorder and serious psychosis, I jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was nineteen years old and after leaving the Bridge, my first thought was that I had made a terrible mistake. Miraculously, I survived – and despite my severe injuries, I was able to reach the surface of the water. Upon my resurfacing, I bobbed up and down in the frigid waters surrounding me. Then, something brushed by my legs. I feared it was a shark come to devour me whole. I tried to punch it thinking it might bite me. However, this marine animal just circled beneath me, bumping me up.”

A passerby, who saw that the animal in question was a sea lion, quickly called for help. A rescue team was able to get to Kevin on time and pull him from the water, but it is doubtful that he would still be alive today had the helpful sea lion not kept his head above water.

4. Deer Chases Away Woman’s Attacker

Source: Scott Darbey /Flickr

In February 2012 , a woman was walking through Oxford, Ohio, when a man dragged her behind a building and tried to choke her with her purse straps. He was seemingly intent on robbing her – if not worse – but these plans were foiled by a heroic deer, who ran out from underneath a nearby bush and scared him off! Sergeant Jon Varley, who assisted the woman after the attack, said he couldn’t “recall a similar incident” during his seventeen-year long career.

The woman suffered red marks and bruises but did not require any hospital treatment. She also did not lose any of her belongings… thanks to the quick-thinking actions of that unknown deer .

5. Beavers Comfort and Save Orphaned Boy

Rheal Guindon, a young boy in Ontario, Canada, was out on a camping trip with his parents when they decided to go fishing. Rheal stayed onshore but was appalled to witness his parents’ boat tip over, and his parents tragically drown. Panic-stricken, he attempted to walk to the nearest town to get help, but as the sun set, he realized he would have to spend the night outside.

As he lay on the ground, traumatized by this ordeal, he felt “a warm, furry body” press up against him. Thinking it was a dog, he fell asleep. On waking up the next morning, he found three wild beavers snuggled up against him. They had saved him from freezing to death overnight when temperatures had dipped below zero.

These incredible stories illustrate that, contrary to certain popular perceptions of wild animals as threats or pests who must be removed to make way for human advancement, we have much more in common with non-human animals – and are a lot more dependent on them – than we realize. They, too, are capable of altruism and compassion . They, too, have been known to step in and help those weaker than themselves at the most unexpected times, and in ways that humans often fail to predict. They, too, deserve to live out their lives on their own terms.

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Save animals!

You can help these critters. Find out how.

GIANT PANDAS AND KOALAS NEED YOU!

Climate change will eventually alter where bamboo ( giant pandas ’ primary food source) and eucalyptus ( koalas' primary food source) can grow, which could shrink habitats in the future. Here’s how you can help save energy—and protect these animals:

• Turn off the lights when you leave a room.

• Hang up your freshly washed clothes to dry.

• Walk or bike as much as you can instead of driving.

FLORIDA MANATEES NEED YOU!

Here’s how you can protect these marine mammals:

• If you see manatees in the wild, don’t give them food or water. Feeding them encourages the mammals to swim too close to boats.

• Stash your trash so manatees won’t get entangled in it.

• If you live near water, ask your parents not to use fertilizer on your lawn. It can dump extra nutrients into the water system, creating wildlife-killing algae blooms in rivers and ocean.

GRAY WOLVES NEED YOU!

Here’s how you can protect these canines:

• Many people don’t know that wolves are in trouble. Write a school report, draw a poster, or just howl about how cool they are to all your friends.

• Keep pets indoors: Conflict between pets and predators makes people less likely to want to protect wolves.

• Learn about how the Endangered Species Act protects gray wolves and other animals in North America and around the world.

GOLDEN LION TAMARINS NEED YOU!

Here’s how you can help save these primates :

• Visit zoos approved by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA); part of your entry fee will be donated to conservation causes.

• Look for products that have a label confirming their ingredients were grown in a rainforest-friendly way.

• Work a lemonade stand and donate the proceeds to a group that supports tamarin conservation.

SOUTHERN WHITE RHINOS NEED YOU!

Here’s how you can help save rhinos :

• Avoid souvenirs made from endangered animal parts, including rhino horn.

• Tell all your friends about cute rhino calves and why they’re in trouble.

• "Adopt" a rhino by saving up your allowance to donate to a rhinoceros conservation organization.

Explore more!

Learn about plastic and how to reduce your use., save the earth, save the earth tips, endangered species act.

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Indian History, Festivals, Essays, Paragraphs, Speeches.

Short Essay on ‘Save Wildlife’ for Students

Category: Essays and Paragraphs On November 27, 2018 By Janhavi

Saving wildlife is crucial because of all the resources that have been bestowed on us by nature, wildlife is one of the most beautiful and varied.

However, wildlife is also one of the most neglected forms in the race towards development. It has come to such a dangerous pass that many more forms of life are at the brink of extinction, not just as a natural phenomenon but because of the effect of human activities. Saving wildlife has become a priority.

Many trees like the dragon trees and the monkey puzzle tree are under threat as well some plants like the Gujarat Lotus and Ebony. It is well known that tigers and Giant Pandas are among the endangered species of animals.

What is threatening wildlife?

To effectively Save Wildlife it is important to under the following critical threats:

Reckless urbanization : The burgeoning population and migration patterns are leading to urbanization like never before. In this the forests and nature are the biggest sufferers as more and more land is claimed for commercial and residential purposes by man.
Loss of habitat: As more and more land is claimed by man; the result is the loss of habitat. Some animals are incapable of breeding in such circumstances and result in their numbers dwindling.
Air and water pollution: Air and water pollution affects the health of birds and animals as much as the humans. All the ill effects of pollution are equally applicable to them. Moreover, they are forced to face the water contamination in absence of potable water for consumption.

How can we save wildlife?

Some of the important measures to save wildlife are as follows:

Conservation of wildlife : Awareness programs to conserve wildlife and volunteering for its cause are two ways in which we can change our attitudes towards wildlife. Educating humans to enable cohabitation with the wildlife where necessary can resolve some issues in the existing form.
Sanctuaries : There need to be more wildlife sanctuaries that will preserve the local flora and fauna and stop the acquisition of land around these areas for habitation. Making vast reserves available to some animals as per their needs is the only way to preserve them
Controlling Pollution : The unwanted effects of pollution on wildlife can be fortunately reversed by getting this factor into control. Making water bodies free of pollution for the wildlife and to check the air pollution around the wildlife reserves can help save many precious lives.
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Paragraph on Save Animals for School Students

In This Blog We Will Discuss

Short Paragraph on Save Animals in 100 Words

Animals have a huge importance in our nature. We might don’t see any direct connection between agriculture and animals. But most of the animals have a huge contribution to agriculture and food growing sources. There is a large number of animals are facing huge aggression and their life is being hard.

There are lots of ways how we can save them. You should restrict all animal-related entertainment such as Zoo and Movies. We shouldn’t support to keep them in prison. They deserve their life in a forest or jungle. Wildlife is way more beautiful than we could imagine. And it is important for our earth.

Paragraph on Save Animals in 150 Words

Because of human cruelty and greed, animals are disappearing every year. There are lots of different types of animals in the world. A lot of them are in danger with the threat of extinction. We need to protect them. There are lots of foundations are working for saving animals such as Save the Tiger Foundation and many more.

It is not possible to describe in words how much important animals are for our ecosystem. They are keeping the food chain normal. If any of them go extinct the food chain gets disturbed and nature becomes polluted. We need to take a step to save animals to save our planet.

Otherwise, our entire ecosystem and the environment will be polluted. To save our earth we need to save them. We need to do so many awareness programs to let people learn more about this topic and that’s how we will be able to save them.

Paragraph on Save Animals in 200 Words

Animals are the biggest part of nature. Even we humans belong as a form of animals. The most shocking and bad thing is that lots of types of animals are disappearing every year from nature. We are being unable to save them. There are so many reasons behind that.

One of the biggest reasons is human predators who hunt animals for their personal gain. We need to stop them. Animals are widely used and it is not possible to describe how important they are for nature, the environment, and to us.

There is a food chain in our ecosystem and we know every animal is connected with each other because of the food chain. When a species of becoming extinct, the food chain becomes imbalanced and it makes a difference in nature. And of course, it is not a good chance. Animals have a contribution to our daily life.

They are helping us in farming and lots of household works. In the previous time, people were too dependent on them. The horse was the best option for communication and the elephant was for transporting goods. In this modern time, we have been so much developed and lost all respect for nature and for the animals. We shouldn’t be like that.

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Save animals Paragraph {100-200 Words}

The planet Earth is home to various living things such as animals, birds, insects and mammals etc. All the species have a different purpose in maintaining the ecosystem of the earth. Each of them possesses the right to live independently.

100 Words Paragraph

Animals are an important part of mother nature. They help in maintaining the ecological balance on Earth. Apart from this, directly or indirectly they influence the lives of other organisms on the planet. In this condition, there is a need to save them so that we can save our planet from becoming a planet with no life.

There are various ways and practices that can help us save animals. First of all, we should stop using products that come by harming animals. Second, we should turn ourselves vegetarian or vegan so as to make sure fewer or no animals are killed. Third, we can join NGOs that encourage wildlife conservation.

{{{ Also Read Essay on Animals }}}

150 Words Paragraph

Research suggests that the human population is growing at a heavy pace while some animal and species numbers are continuously declining on the planet. This is a critical problem for the planet and for the existence of life on the planet. Thus, Saving animals is the need of the hour.

Natural habitats of animals are being destroyed by humans for land development and agriculture. Hunting and poaching of animals are other disgusting factors contributing to the extinction of wildlife. This is done for obtaining meat, leather, fur and teeth etc.

As an individual, we can adopt simple tricks that would help save at least 100+ animals in a year. For example, we should stop wearing clothes or accessories that come from poisoning animals to death. Other than this, we can use products free from substances that come from violence against animals.

200 Words Paragraph

Since ancient times, humans have been using animals for different purposes. But gradually this usefulness of animals transformed into the exploitation of animals. Today, humans have become cruel towards animals for the sake of meeting their greed.

But from nature’s point of view, animals are as important to the planet as humans do. In fact, directly or indirectly animals influence the lives of other organisms and the ecological balance of the planet. If we want to see a planet full of different life forms, we need to contribute to saving animals.

Moreover, We can join NGOs that take a stand against cruelty towards animals. We can help these organisations financially and physically. Most noteworthy, the government needs to stop deforestation and save forests that are homes for many animals. The smuggling of animals and animal-based products needs to be stopped which is the biggest reason for cruelty against animals.

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Animal Essay

what happens in spring animals in spring Book

500 Words Essay on Animal

Animals carry a lot of importance in our lives. They offer humans with food and many other things. For instance, we consume meat, eggs, dairy products. Further, we use animals as a pet too. They are of great help to handicaps. Thus, through the animal essay, we will take a look at these creatures and their importance.

Types of Animals

First of all, all kinds of living organisms which are eukaryotes and compose of numerous cells and can sexually reproduce are known as animals. All animals have a unique role to play in maintaining the balance of nature.

A lot of animal species exist in both, land and water. As a result, each of them has a purpose for their existence. The animals divide into specific groups in biology. Amphibians are those which can live on both, land and water.

Reptiles are cold-blooded animals which have scales on their body. Further, mammals are ones which give birth to their offspring in the womb and have mammary glands. Birds are animals whose forelimbs evolve into wings and their body is covered with feather.

They lay eggs to give birth. Fishes have fins and not limbs. They breathe through gills in water. Further, insects are mostly six-legged or more. Thus, these are the kinds of animals present on earth.

Importance of Animals

Animals play an essential role in human life and planet earth. Ever since an early time, humans have been using animals for their benefit. Earlier, they came in use for transportation purposes.

Further, they also come in use for food, hunting and protection. Humans use oxen for farming. Animals also come in use as companions to humans. For instance, dogs come in use to guide the physically challenged people as well as old people.

In research laboratories, animals come in use for drug testing. Rats and rabbits are mostly tested upon. These researches are useful in predicting any future diseases outbreaks. Thus, we can protect us from possible harm.

Astronomers also use animals to do their research. They also come in use for other purposes. Animals have use in various sports like racing, polo and more. In addition, they also have use in other fields.

They also come in use in recreational activities. For instance, there are circuses and then people also come door to door to display the tricks by animals to entertain children. Further, they also come in use for police forces like detection dogs.

Similarly, we also ride on them for a joyride. Horses, elephants, camels and more come in use for this purpose. Thus, they have a lot of importance in our lives.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Animal Essay

Thus, animals play an important role on our planet earth and in human lives. Therefore, it is our duty as humans to protect animals for a better future. Otherwise, the human race will not be able to survive without the help of the other animals.

FAQ on Animal Essay

Question 1: Why are animals are important?

Answer 1: All animals play an important role in the ecosystem. Some of them help to bring out the nutrients from the cycle whereas the others help in decomposition, carbon, and nitrogen cycle. In other words, all kinds of animals, insects, and even microorganisms play a role in the ecosystem.

Question 2: How can we protect animals?

Answer 2: We can protect animals by adopting them. Further, one can also volunteer if one does not have the means to help. Moreover, donating to wildlife reserves can help. Most importantly, we must start buying responsibly to avoid companies which harm animals to make their products.

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A photo illustration of a bison smiling.

How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling?

Animal-welfare science tries to get inside the minds of a huge range of species — in order to help improve their lives.

Credit... Photo Illustration by Zachary Scott

Supported by

By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Bill Wasik is the magazine’s editorial director and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer.

April 23, 2024

What makes a desert tortoise happy? Before you answer, we should be more specific: We’re talking about a Sonoran desert tortoise, one of a few species of drab, stocky tortoises native to North America’s most arid landscapes. Adapted to the rocky crevices that striate the hills from western Arizona to northern Mexico, this long-lived reptile impassively plods its range, browsing wildflowers, scrub grasses and cactus paddles during the hours when it’s not sheltering from the brutal heat or bitter cold. Sonoran desert tortoises evolved to thrive in an environment so different from what humans find comfortable that we can rarely hope to encounter one during our necessarily short forays — under brimmed hats and layers of sunblock, carrying liters of water and guided by GPS — into their native habitat.

Listen to this article, read by Gabra Zackman

This past November, in a large, carpeted banquet room on the University of Wisconsin’s River Falls campus, hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and veterinary students silently considered the lived experience of a Sonoran desert tortoise. Perhaps nine in 10 of the participants were women, reflecting the current demographics of students drawn to veterinary medicine and other animal-related fields. From 23 universities in the United States and Canada, and one in the Netherlands, they had traveled here to compete in an unusual test of empathy with a wide range of creatures: the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest.

That morning in the banquet room, the academics and experts who organize the contest (under the sponsorship of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the nation’s primary professional society for vets) laid out three different fictional scenarios, each one involving a binary choice: Which animals are better off? One scenario involved groups of laying hens in two different facilities, a family farm versus a more corporate affair. Another involved bison being raised for meat, some in a smaller, more managed operation and others ranging more widely with less hands-on human contact.

Then there were the tortoises. On screens along the room’s outer edge, a series of projected slides laid out two different settings: one, a desert museum exhibiting seven Sonoran specimens together in a large, naturalistically barren outdoor enclosure; the other, a suburban zoo housing a group of four tortoises, segregated by sex, in small indoor and outdoor pens furnished with a variety of tortoise toys and enticements. Into the slides had been packed an exhausting array of detail about the care provided for the tortoises in each facility. Only contestants who had prepared thoroughly for the competition — by researching the nutritional, environmental, social and medical needs of the species in question — would be able to determine which was doing a better job.

“Animal welfare” is sometimes misused as a synonym for “animal rights,” but in practice the two worldviews can sometimes be at cross purposes. From an animal rights perspective, nearly every human use of animals is morally suspect, but animal-welfare thinkers take it as a given that animals of all kinds do exist in human care, for better or worse, and focus on how to treat them as well as possible. In the past half century, an interdisciplinary group of academics, working across veterinary medicine and other animal-focused fields, have been trying to codify what we know about animal care in a body of research referred to as “animal-welfare science.”

The research has unlocked riddles about animal behavior, spurred changes in how livestock are treated and even brought about some advances in how we care for our pets: Studies of domestic cats, for example, have found that “puzzle feeders,” which slow consumption and increase mental and physical effort while eating, can improve their health and even make them friendlier. The discipline has begun to inform policy too, including requirements for scientists receiving federal grants for their animal-based research, regulations governing transport and slaughter of livestock, accreditation standards for zoos and aquariums and guidelines for veterinarians performing euthanasia.

Contest organizers hope to help their students, who might someday go into a range of animal-related jobs — not just as vets but in agribusiness, conservation, government and more — employ data and research to improve every aspect of animal well-being. Americans own an estimated 150 million dogs and cats, and our policies and consumption patterns determine how hundreds of millions of creatures from countless other species will live and die. The Animal Welfare Assessment Contest tries to introduce students to that enormous collective responsibility, and to the complexity of figuring out what each of these animals needs, especially when — as in the case of reptiles living in a shell — their outlook differs radically from our own.

The effort to improve the lives of America’s animals began more than 150 years ago. As it happens, a hundred or so turtles figured in one of the most important events in the early history of animal activism in America. It was May 1866 — the heyday of turtle soup, a dish so beloved at the time that restaurants in New York would take out newspaper ads, or even maintain special outdoor signage, declaring the hour at which the day’s batch would be ready. And so this group of unlucky sea turtles, after being captured by hunters in Florida, was brought to New York upside down on a schooner. To further immobilize them, holes were pierced through their fins with cords run through them.

The turtles would have assumed a tranquil, passive demeanor under such conditions, perhaps making it possible for the ship’s crew to believe that the creatures weren’t suffering. But there is every reason to believe they were. Evolution has equipped the marine turtle for a life afloat, with a large lung capacity filling the space beneath the shell, to enable long dives. When the turtles were on their backs, the weight of their organs would have put pressure on these lungs, forcing their breathing to become deliberate and deep.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals started up the month before. Its president and founder, a Manhattan shipbuilding heir named Henry Bergh, spent its early weeks focusing on domestic species — above all, horses, the rough treatment of which in 19th-century streets was the main inspiration for his activism. But when he became aware of these suffering sea turtles for sale at Fulton Market, he decided to extend his campaign to a wildlife species that then barely rated more consideration than a cockroach, if not a cabbage.

Bergh made a case that the infliction of prolonged pain and distress upon sea turtles bound for the soup pot was illegal as well as immoral. As with other “mute servants of mankind” providing labor, locomotion, meat or milk to human beings, the turtle was entitled to be treated with compassion. But when Bergh hauled the ship’s captain in front of a judge, the defense argued (successfully!) that turtles were not even “animals,” but rather a form of fish, and thereby did not qualify under the new animal-cruelty law that Bergh succeeded in passing earlier that year.

Still, the case became a media sensation — and signaled to New Yorkers that Bergh’s campaign on behalf of animals was going to force them to account for the suffering of all animals, not just the ones they already chose to care about.

It’s perhaps no accident that Bergh turned to activism after a failed career as a dramatist. There’s something irreducibly imaginative in considering questions of animal welfare, regardless of how much science we marshal to back up our conclusions. George Angell of Boston, his fellow titan of that founding generation of animal advocates, pirated a 13-year-old British novel called “Black Beauty” and turned it into one of the century’s best-selling books, touting it as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Horse” — though its real innovation was its use of an animal as a first-person narrator, thrusting readers into a working horse’s perspective and forcing them to contemplate how the equines all around them might see the world differently.

But how far does imagination really get us? The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously explored this problem in an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” which took up that question only to dramatize the impossibility of answering it to anyone’s satisfaction. “It will not help,” he wrote, “to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.”

In the case of chelonians like turtles — and their encarapaced brethren, the tortoises — we may know even less about how they experience the world than we do about bats. Take their vision, for example: Among those species that have been studied, scientists have found evidence of broad-spectrum color vision, sometimes including ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to the human eye. And while chelonians can see well beyond their pointed beaks, where edible vegetation or predators may await notice, their brains process these visual signals slowly — a quality of certain animal brains that might, some experts have theorized, result in a sped-up perception of time. (In chelonian eyes, do grasses wave frenetically in the breeze and clouds race across the sky?)

Next to vision, smell is probably the sense turtles and tortoises rely upon most. Their sensitive nasal epithelium, distributed between two chambers, can detect odors diffused in a warm desert breeze or dissolved in a cold ocean current. Chelonian ears are where you’d expect them to be, but buried beneath their scaled reptilian skin. They hear well at low frequencies, even if they don’t register the high notes of twittering birds, humming mosquitoes or the whistling wind. Some chelonians seem to have the power of magnetoreception, which means that somewhere in their anatomy — perhaps their eyes, or their nervous systems, or elsewhere — there are chemicals or structures that allow them to sense the earth’s geomagnetic field and navigate by it.

The chelonian sense of touch presents fewer mysteries. Specialized receptors in the skin and on the shell detect mechanical, temperature and pain stimuli and send messages to the nervous system — just as they do in humans and a wide variety of other species. Recognition of pain, in particular, is considered a primordial sense, essential to the survival of animals on every limb of the evolutionary tree. But even here, there are differences separating species: What does the nervous system do with signals from its nociceptors? Does the desert tortoise withdraw its foot from the scorpion’s tail only reflexively, or does it consciously register the pain of the sting? What suffering does a turtle endure when its shell is struck by the sharp edges of a boat propeller?

As Nagel argued, there is no way to meaningfully narrow the gulch in understanding that exists around “what it is like to be” such a creature. The strategy of animal-welfare science is to patiently use what we can observe about these other kinds of minds — what they choose to eat and to do, how they interact with their environments, how they respond to certain forms of treatment — looking for objective cues to show experts what imagination cannot.

Upstairs from the banquet hall, student competitors nervously milled around carpeted corridors. One by one they were called into conference rooms to face a judge, who sat at a table beside a digital chronograph. In one room, a neatly dressed young woman in owlish glasses took a breath as the display began counting up hundredths of seconds in bright red digits. Catherine LeBlond, a second-year student at Atlantic Veterinary College at Canada’s University of Prince Edward Island, began her presentation about the bison scenario.

She was allowed to refer only to a single 3-by-5 index card, which she had packed with information based on a “summary sheet” of takeaways that she and her teammates worked up together, with key phrases emphasized and sources cited, all of it broken down by category: social behavior (“Bison are a very social species with strong matriarchal divisions”), handling guidelines (“Prods should not be used to move bison unless safety is an issue”), facility design (“Ensure that there is a sufficient number of gates within facilities to slow the animals”), euthanasia (“The recommended euthanasia method of a bison is gunshot”) and more.

LeBlond began by declaring her choice: The wilder facility provided a more humane environment for its animals. She felt it was helping bison “live a more natural life”: The more spacious grounds would support wallowing behavior, she reasoned, and allow the animals to choose their social grouping, an important policy given bisons’ strong sense of social structure. She also praised the operation for enabling bison to avoid “aversive life events,” by using drones, rather than ranchers on horseback, to monitor the animals in the field, and also by slaughtering the animals on-site to avoid the distress they experience in transport. As she ran through her presentation, she took care to hit two important rhetorical notes that judges look for: “granting” some areas in which the other institution excelled and offering positive advice about how it might improve.

One way to think about her reasoning is through the lens of “the five freedoms,” a rubric that animal-welfare thinkers have long embraced to consider all the different obligations that humans have to the animals in their care. They are: 1. the freedom from hunger and thirst; 2. the freedom from discomfort; 3. the freedom from pain, injury or disease; 4. the freedom to express normal behavior; and 5. the freedom from fear and distress. In fact, it was arguably the articulation of these five freedoms — in the Brambell Report, a document put out by a British government committee in 1965 to assess the welfare conditions of the nation’s livestock — that inaugurated the whole field of animal-welfare science.

What made this list of “freedoms” so influential, in retrospect, was that it created a context for other, more targeted thinking about how a species might experience each freedom or its violation. What sort of environment will offer “freedom from discomfort” to a beef steer, on the one hand, and a freedom “to express normal behavior” on the other? Trying to answer such questions in a rigorous way involves considerations of veterinary medicine but also of evolutionary history, behavioral observation, physiology (scientists have begun using proxies like cortisol levels as an indication of animal stress), neuroscience and more.

In her bison presentation, by citing “a more natural life” and avoiding “aversive life events,” LeBlond was emphasizing Freedoms 4 and 5, the freedom to express normal behavior and the freedom from distress. In the scenario about tortoises, though, Freedoms 4 and 5 seemed to be at odds. When LeBlond addressed the judge for that category, she awarded the edge to the zoo — weighing its better health outcomes and stimulating enrichments over the more naturalistic setting at the museum. She zeroed in on the zoo’s visitor program, which gave the tortoises a novel method of choosing whether or not they wanted to interact with humans: Staff put out a transport crate, and over the course of 20 minutes, tortoises could decide to climb into the crate to be taken to the human guests, and later receive a special biscuit for their service.

And she linked this to a behavioral difference, illustrated by a set of charts comparing how readily each set of tortoises moved toward a “novel object” (like an enrichment toy) or a “novel person” in their midst. The numbers showed that the zoo’s tortoises were far more drawn to interactions with people. “This indicates that they have less fear of humans,” LeBlond pointed out, “which could be because they are given a choice about whether or not they get to participate in educational programs, and those that do are positively reinforced with high-value rewards.”

Most of the students followed a similar logic and chose the zoo. The judges, however, disagreed. As one of them explained later at the awards ceremony — at which LeBlond took second place among vet students — the facility may have seemed to be offering their tortoises a consensual choice, but it was more accurate to see it as heavy-handed operant conditioning, which lured them into submitting to human contact with the promise of a biscuit. In scenarios involving domestic animals, a documented comfort around humans is a sign of positive treatment, but when it comes to wild animals, the goal is the opposite: to acclimate them as little to human contact as possible. Another way of putting it is this: Biscuits might make a desert tortoise “happy,” insofar as we can even imagine what that means, but happiness isn’t ultimately what humane treatment is about.

Each year at the contest, competitors are asked to perform one “live” assessment: a situation with real animals in it. This time, the species of choice was the laboratory rat. We joined Kurt Vogel, head of the Animal Welfare Lab at University of Wisconsin-River Falls, on a tour of the scenario that he and a colleague, Brian Greco, had constructed in a warren of rooms a few buildings over from the competition site.

They had brought a great deal of brio to the task. In the first room, where several rats snoozed in containers, Vogel and Greco had left a panoply of welfare infractions for eagle-eyed students to find. One cage was missing a water bottle, while others housed only a single rat, a violation of best practices (rats prefer to be housed in groups). Feed bags sat on the floor with detritus all around, and a note in a lab journal indicated that pest rodents had been observed snacking on it.

In subsequent rooms, the horrors became more baroque. A euthanasia chamber had the wrong size lid on it, and a nearby journal described a rat escaping in the middle of its extermination. Paperwork in an office laid out the nature of the study being performed, which involved prolonged deprivation of food and water, forced swimming and exposure to wet bedding. Diagrams showed that the rats’ brains were being studied through physical implants, and students could see that the operating room was a nightmare, littered with unsterile implements and the researchers’ food trash (the remnants of Vogel’s bagel sandwich, deliberately left behind). None of the abuse was real — Vogel and Greco were even taking care to cycle the rats in and out of the fake scenario, in order to avoid undue stress from the parade of students who came through taking notes.

Happiness isn’t ultimately what humane treatment is about.

Rodents did not always play the role in labs that they do today. In the late 19th century, experiments were carried out on a whole host of species, including a high proportion of dogs — a fact that animal-welfare activists publicized to turn the “vivisection” debate into a political issue, to the point that even some prominent doctors became galvanized to restrict or ban the practice. In the 20th century, as research shifted to carefully bred rats and mice, optimized for predictability and uniformity, animal experimentation receded as an issue in the public discourse. Today animal-welfare advocates struggle to motivate their base on the matter of rodents: the Humane Society’s website illustrates its section on “Taking Suffering Out of Science” (which sits at the very end in its list of the group’s current “fights”) with a picture of a beagle in a cage, despite the fact that roughly 95 percent of all lab mammals are now rats or mice.

Lab rodents are maybe the most vivid example of a species whose suffering is hard to know how to weigh against the benefits it provides us. Studies using rat and mouse models have sought to answer basic scientific questions across diverse fields of inquiry: psychology, physiology, pathology, genetics. Look into any new advance in human health care, and you’re likely to find that it’s built on years of experimentation that consumed the lives of literally thousands of rodents. We may now be on the cusp of innovations that could allow that toll to be radically reduced — by essentially replacing animal models with some combination of virtual simulations and lab-grown tissue and organs — but it’s hard to imagine a world anytime soon where human patients would be subject to therapies that have never been tested on hundreds of animals. No one even reliably counts how many rodents are killed in U.S. labs every year, but the estimates range from 10 million up to more than 100 million.

This question of scale especially haunts the problem of livestock, which is an area where many of the contest’s student competitors will eventually find jobs. America is currently home to roughly 87 million cattle and 75 million pigs: populations that exceed those of dogs and cats in scale, but the welfare of which commands so much less of our moral attention.

When the practice of centralized, industrialized livestock management began in earnest after the Civil War, the treatment of the animals, especially during slaughter, could be barbaric. Pigs were simply hoisted up and their throats cut, and after some point were assumed to be dead enough to dump into boiling water so that the sharp bristles on their skin could be scraped away. There was little doubt that some of them were still conscious at the point that they were plunged into the water, as was reported in a broad exposé in 1880 by The Chicago Tribune: “Not infrequently,” the reporter noted, “a hog reaches the scalding-tub before life is extinct; in fact, they sometimes are very full of life when they reach the point whence they are dumped into the seething tub.”

After 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” exposed the industry’s unsanitary practices, a series of reforms did lead to significant improvements in the lives and deaths of American livestock. Thanks to the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, federal law now requires that animals be “rendered insensible to pain” before the act of killing; with pigs, this is generally done either with electrocution or by suffocation in a carbon-dioxide chamber, while with cattle, the method of choice is the captive-bolt gun. And since the 1970s, animal-welfare science has led to some considerable reforms. Perhaps the most transformational work has been done by Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist whose research into how food animals experience and respond to their environment — particularly during transport and slaughter — has changed the way that meat and dairy producers operate.

Still, despite years of promises to end the practice, many sows are still kept almost permanently in 7-feet-by-2-feet “gestation crates,” too small to turn around in. And the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) has doomed millions of pigs, cattle and chickens to lives spent cheek to jowl in the stench of their own waste — waste that also threatens the health of nearby communities and ecosystems.

At the contest, many attendees were excited about the gains that artificial intelligence could bring to the animal-welfare field. Pilot studies have indeed shown great promise: For example, with A.I. assistance, 24-hour video surveillance can help pinpoint sick or injured animals much more quickly so they can be pulled out for veterinary care. Last year, a group of European researchers announced that based on 7,000 recordings of more than 400 pigs, they had made significant progress in understanding the meaning of their grunts. “By training an algorithm to recognize these sounds, we can classify 92 percent of the calls to the correct emotion,” one of the scientists remarked.

That well may be, but given what we know about pigs — specifically, their remarkable intelligence, which rivals (if not exceeds) that of a dog, to the point that a group of scientists recently trained some to play video games — there is no amount of A.I.-driven progress that can reconcile their short, crowded life as an American industrial food animal with any definition of what a “good” life looks like for such brainy creatures, all 75 million of them.

The laying hen, among the four species considered at the contest, is the one that lives among us in the largest numbers: There are an estimated 308 million of them in the United States alone, or nine for every 10 Americans. In a backyard flock, these hens could be expected to live six to eight years, but a vast majority of them toil in industrial operations that will slaughter them after only two to three years, once their productivity (six eggs a week) declines — and chickens, notably, are not covered by the Humane Slaughter Act. Poor air quality, soiled litter, nutritional stress and conflict with other chickens can contribute to dietary deficiencies, infectious diseases, egg-laying complications, self-mutilation, even cannibalism. And even in the best laying-hen operations, including the “cage-free” ones imagined in the contest scenario, these are short lives spent under 16 hours a day of artificial lighting in extremely close quarters with other birds.

More than in the other scenarios, the organizers had made the laying-hen choice a straightforward one. The corporate farm offered fewer amenities for the birds, which were also observed rarely to use the dirt-floored, plastic-covered “veranda” that was supposed to serve as a respite from their long hours laying in the aviary. The more commodious verandas of the family farm, covered with synthetic grass, proved more popular with their chickens, and in warm weather, its birds made use of a screened “garden” as well.

In her presentation, Catherine LeBlond correctly picked the family farm, for many of the same reasons that the judges did. Again, she “granted” some positive qualities of the corporate farm and offered it some advice — reflecting, after all, the values of the veterinary profession that she was training to enter, a field that takes on the advising of everyone who has animals in their care, not only the most conscientious.

Even so, at the very end, LeBlond briefly stepped back to ask a true ethical question, one that troubled the entire premise of a multibillion-dollar global industry: “whether or not it is ethical to keep these hens for the sole purpose of egg-laying, only to have them slaughtered at the end.” Among the scores of students we watched over the course of a weekend, LeBlond and her teammates from the Atlantic Veterinary College were the only ones who, in the final seconds of their talks, raised deep questions about the scenario’s entire premise — about whether, in the end, these fictional animals should have been put in these fictional situations in the first place.

It was a question that the judges of the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest had no doubt considered, but it also was one that seemed to lie outside the contest’s purview: In its either-or structure, the contest is helping train future professionals how to improve, rather than remove, the ties that bind animals into human society. Unless the day arrives when there is no need for laboratory rats, or poultry barns, or facilities to house desert tortoises and other captive wildlife, the animals of North America will be in the hands of veterinarians and animal scientists like LeBlond and her classmates, to help shape their situations the very best way they can.

Parts of this article are adapted from “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals,” by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, published this month by Knopf.

Read by Gabra Zackman

Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan and Emma Kehlbeck

Engineered by Lance Neal

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Speech on Save Animals

Animals are vital for our planet’s health and balance. They bring joy, assist in ecosystems functioning, and contribute to life’s diversity. But sadly, many species are nearing extinction.

You hold the power to make a difference. Your actions can help save animals and protect these precious life forms. Let’s explore how.

1-minute Speech on Save Animals

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls,

Let’s talk about animals today. You know, the ones with fur, feathers, or scales. Some are big, some are small, but all of them are important. We share our world with them, right? But, they need our help now. Their homes are being destroyed and many are getting hurt or lost. They need us to care.

Firstly, animals are our friends. They give us joy, comfort, and sometimes even help us work. Dogs guard our homes, cats keep away pests, and horses were our first cars. But, more than that, they make us happy. When you see a puppy or a kitten, don’t you smile? Don’t you feel happy when you see a bird flying high? They are a part of our world, our lives. We need to protect them because they make life better.

Secondly, animals help keep our world alive. Did you know that bees, those little buzzing insects, help plants grow? They carry pollen from one flower to another. Without them, we won’t have fruits or veggies. Birds, bats, and bugs, they all do the same. They help nature do its job. If they are gone, our world will suffer.

Lastly, remember, saving animals means saving ourselves. If animals are safe, our world is safe. If they are in danger, so are we. We breathe the same air, drink the same water. If we let harm come to them, we let harm come to us.

So, do your bit. Help save animals. Don’t hurt them, don’t destroy their homes. Be kind, caring, and considerate. Our world is their world too. Let’s make it a safe place together. Thank you.

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Essay on Save Animals
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2-minute Speech on Save Animals

Friends, I stand before you today to speak on a very important issue – ‘Save Animals’. The animals that share this earth with us are precious, and every one of them plays a vital role in the balance of nature.

In our first point, let’s talk about the beauty and diversity animals bring to our world. Look around you. We see birds soaring in the sky, fish swimming in the rivers, and animals like lions and elephants roaming in the wilderness. Each animal, big or small, adds color and life to our world. They make our planet a lively, vibrant place.

Next, let’s think about how animals help us. Animals are more than just our companions or food sources. They help us in many ways we may not even realize. Bees, for example, help to pollinate plants. This helps fruits, vegetables, and crops grow. Without them, we wouldn’t have much of the food we eat daily. And think about the horses, dogs, and elephants that work with us in various jobs. They’ve been our friends and helpers for centuries.

Now, let’s focus on the sad part. Many animal species are in danger. They are losing their homes because of things we humans do. We cut down forests to build houses and roads. We hunt animals for fun or sell them for money. Some animals are even disappearing from the earth forever. This is called extinction. We’ve all heard of the dodo bird, haven’t we? It used to live on our planet, but now it’s gone forever because of us.

But friends, it’s not too late to make things right. We can save animals, and we can start today. We can stop hunting animals for fun. We can stop buying things made from animal parts. We can plant more trees to give them homes. We can even start by taking care of the animals around us. Do you remember the last time you saw a stray dog? Did you help it or ignore it?

In conclusion, animals are a vital part of our world. They make our planet beautiful, they help us in many ways, and they deserve our love and respect. If we don’t protect them, we could lose them forever. And a world without animals would be a very sad place indeed.

Every life matters, and every action counts. So let’s take action. Let’s love and respect our animal friends. Let’s do our part to save animals. Because in saving them, we are also saving ourselves and our beautiful planet. Thank you.

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Save Nature Essay

Introduction

We are always happy to get gifts from others, as they make us feel special and valued. Nature is such a gift given to us that it must be treated equally like any other gift. We might think that since nature and its resources are available for free, we can utilise them in whichever way we want. This approach towards nature is not good, and this is what is discussed in this save our nature essay.

The minute we step out of our homes, we are entering the space of nature, and everything we see around us forms a part of it. The plants, trees, flowers, sky, soil, water, sun, insects, and wind all fall under nature. Therefore, we must keep our nature as beautiful as it is.

Importance of Saving Nature

Even though nature has a significant role in supporting our lives, each component has a specific role in maintaining the balance of nature. While we get food to eat, air to breathe and water to drink from nature, we also enjoy the natural beauty and sounds as they lift our moods. Nature provides us with many resources, and we return its kindness by overexploiting and harming nature. Thus, as people living on Earth, we need to be conscious of our actions on surroundings that disrupt its natural flow.

Human activities are the main villain that harms nature. Earlier, it was not evident the dangerous effects of human exploitation on nature. When we think that we have only cut down a single tree, which might not damage nature, remember that there would be hundreds of others who think like you. So, one tree becomes hundreds, thousands and millions. At this pace, nature will soon exhaust its resources, and we will be suffering from various natural disasters and diseases. To put it simply, our mere existence would be threatened. This is why we need to preserve nature. In this how to save nature essay, we explore a few ways to coexist with nature.

Ways to Save Nature

We must be mindful of the fact that though nature has infinite resources, they will soon get depleted if we use them carelessly. As people started moving to cities, this led to the clearance of land and deforestation. The impact is environmental threats, such as green gas emissions, global warming, extinction of natural flora and fauna, etc. And the price we will have to pay will be huge.

To save ourselves from natural calamities and protect nature, let us move towards sustainable practices. By using eco-friendly products and discarding plastic and other non-degradable materials, we are doing a huge favour to our nature. We can also join our hands to reduce pollution by segregating wastes, using public transport and avoiding the use of pesticides. This save our nature essay from BYJU’S will be helpful for children to understand that if we take care of these trivial things, we can ensure the long life of nature.

You can explore more essays similar to the save nature essay on BYJU’S website to enhance kids’ learning experience. Also, access a wide range of kid-friendly learning resources on the website.

What is meant by nature?

The things that we see around us, which are not made by humans, constitute nature. It includes all living and nonliving things like air, water, sun, wind, animals, trees, mountains, oceans, etc.

What are some of the ways to save nature?

We can save nature if we stop over utilising the resources given to us by nature. We must preserve our environment as it is and not loot its materials. Moreover, we must take an environment-friendly approach, which must be reflected in our actions.

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Essay on Save Animals
250 Words Essay on Save Animals The Imperative of Animal Conservation. The world is a rich tapestry of biodiversity, with animals playing a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance. The urgency to save animals is not merely an emotional appeal, but a dire necessity for the survival of our ecosystems. Ecological Significance
Short Essay on Save Animals [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
Short Essay on Save Animals in 100 Words. As part of the ecosystem, all living beings have the right to survive. A force in the world can claim the life of a living creature, be it an animal, bird, or human being. Even mute animals have reasons and purposes to survive. So if they are uselessly harmed then humans have to protest against that.
Why should we save endangered animals?
And, loss of habitat is by far the biggest cause. This is a problem that we need to address, and here are a few reasons why. 1. For the enjoyment of future generations. One of the strongest arguments for saving endangered animals is simply that we want to. We get a lot of pleasure out of seeing and interacting with animals.
Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?
The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis. By Robert Kunzig. Snail ...
Wildlife Conservation
Wildlife conservation is the practice of protecting plant and animal species and their habitats. Wildlife is integral to the world's ecosystems, providing balance and stability to nature's processes. The goal of wildlife conservation is to ensure the survival of these species, and to educate people on living sustainably with other species.
In Defense of Biodiversity: Why Protecting Species from Extinction
Pyron's essay - with lines such as, "The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings" and "[T]he impulse to conserve for conservation's sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency" - left the impression that it was written in a conservative think tank, perhaps by one of the anti-regulatory ...
Wildlife Conservation Essay for Students and Children
The Wildlife Conservation Essay is an insight into the requirements of conserving wildlife globally. Deforestation is also a major cause of wildlife loss. Mass murders of wild animals are taking place all over the globe for their meat, bones, fur, teeth, hair, skin, etc. The need for conservation of wildlife has now become a necessity.
Essay on Save Wildlife
500 Words Essay on Save Wildlife Introduction to Saving Wildlife. Wild animals and plants are very important for the health of our planet. They make the earth beautiful and balanced. But sadly, many of these animals and plants are in danger because of things like cutting down forests, pollution, and climate change.
Why we need to protect the wildlife
Why we protect wildlife. Animals and plants aren't just valuable for their own sake - they're also part of a wider natural environment that may provide food, shelter, water, and other functions, for other wildlife and people. With so much wildlife at risk, the question people often ask us is how do we decide which animals and plants to ...
Essay on Save Animals
Science. English. ₹ 48,400 (9% Off) ₹ 44,000 per year. Select and buy. Essay on Save Animals. Ans: Wildlife is a precious gift from God for this planet. The term \"fauna\" is not only for wild animals but also for all non-domesticated life forms including birds, insects, plants, fungi and even microscopic organisms.
Save Animals
Animals are an important part of the food cycle, and humans depend on them for a wide range of requirements. It is important to save animals from extinction and human predators who like to hunt them for their personal gains. Human life has become supreme to all else with no respect left for nature. To keep the balance of nature in place we have ...
Essay on Save Endangered Animals
500 Words Essay on Save Endangered Animals Why Saving Endangered Animals is Important. Many animals around the world are in danger of disappearing forever. This is a big problem because every animal plays a special role in nature. Some animals help to keep the environment clean, while others are food for different animals. If we lose one animal ...
Essay on Animals: Samples in 100, 200 and 300 Words
Therefore, saving animals is as important as saving ourselves. Also Read: Essay on Cow: 100 to 500 Words. Essay on Animals in 200 Words. Animals play a major role in maintaining the balance of our ecosystem. They contribute to our biodiversity by enriching the environment with their diverse species. Animals range from microscopic organisms to ...
These 5 Stories of Amazing Times Wild Animals Who Helped Humans in Need
Source: Tory Kallman / Shutterstock In late 2004, lifeguard Rob Howes and his family were out swimming at Ocean Beach, near Whangarei, New Zealand, when seven bottlenose dolphins approached and ...
Save animals
Here's how you can help save rhinos: • Avoid souvenirs made from endangered animal parts, including rhino horn. • Tell all your friends about cute rhino calves and why they're in trouble. • "Adopt" a rhino by saving up your allowance to donate to a rhinoceros conservation organization. You can help these critters.
Short Essay on 'Save Wildlife' for Students
Saving wildlife is crucial because of all the resources that have been bestowed on us by nature, wildlife is one of the most beautiful and varied. ... Short Essay on 'Save Wildlife' for Students. Category: Essays and Paragraphs On November 27, ... Some animals are incapable of breeding in such circumstances and result in their numbers ...
Paragraph on Save Animals for School Students
Short Paragraph on Save Animals in 100 Words. Animals have a huge importance in our nature. We might don't see any direct connection between agriculture and animals. But most of the animals have a huge contribution to agriculture and food growing sources. There is a large number of animals are facing huge aggression and their life is being hard.
Save Animals Paragraph {100-200 Words}
{{{ Also Read Essay on Animals}}} 150 Words Paragraph. Research suggests that the human population is growing at a heavy pace while some animal and species numbers are continuously declining on the planet. This is a critical problem for the planet and for the existence of life on the planet. Thus, Saving animals is the need of the hour.
Animal Essay for Students and Children
500 Words Essay on Animal. Animals carry a lot of importance in our lives. They offer humans with food and many other things. For instance, we consume meat, eggs, dairy products. Further, we use animals as a pet too.
How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling?
They are: 1. the freedom from hunger and thirst; 2. the freedom from discomfort; 3. the freedom from pain, injury or disease; 4. the freedom to express normal behavior; and 5. the freedom from ...
Speech on Save Animals
Lastly, remember, saving animals means saving ourselves. If animals are safe, our world is safe. If they are in danger, so are we. We breathe the same air, drink the same water. If we let harm come to them, we let harm come to us. ... Essay on Save Animals; 10-lines on Save Animals; 2-minute Speech on Save Animals. Friends, I stand before you ...
Persuasive Essay On Save Animals
Persuasive Essay On Save Animals. Animals are the beginning to the best nerve wrecking filled love you could ever dream of for your life. Ever since I was a young child, I've always resonated with the idea of helping animals more so than anyone and anything else in this world. My love for animals had begun when I was a mere four years old.
Save Nature Essay
We can save nature if we stop over utilising the resources given to us by nature. We must preserve our environment as it is and not loot its materials. Moreover, we must take an environment-friendly approach, which must be reflected in our actions. Nature is our life and soul that needs to be nourished. In this save our nature essay, we explain ...
Essay on Animals in English
Long essay on Animals is for students of Classes 8,9 and 10 and competitive exam aspirants. The Earth is home to many creatures. Animals have been the inhabitants of this planet, along with humans. Historically, animals were used for transportation, protection, as well as for hunting. Animals have been companions to man since time immemorial.