Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/245

Rh difficult to advocate, and yet, I must confess, it is the one which appeals most to my mind. It is an ethical question, and it is fair to say that its force cannot be urged without admitting an element of all other arguments. Why should it mean any thing to us if a species becomes extinct, ceases to exist? Nature's competitive struggle has swept away untold forms without any call upon man's influence, swept them away before man appeared upon the earth, brushed them aside, the "thousand types," actually to allow the development of the better fitted creatures, amongst which man ranks so high. If man be merely looked upon as a competitor in a highly competitive world, there is no reason why we should bemoan the fate of such types as were an impediment to his development. Yet, I am sure that many share my feeling of regret whenever they see evidence of depletion in numbers of any species; probably they also share my inability to explain why, when wanton destruction or the influence of purely natural forces is causing this reduction, a wave of sentiment, which has in it something of the feeling of chivalry, impels them to uphold the cause of the oppressed. Frankly it is not the death of the individual which matters—thus the humanitarian impulse fails to apply—it is the threatened destruction of some existing form.

We cannot argue, at any rate with ease, that we suffer personally because the great auk foolishly refused to develop wings and would persist in placing its egg on a shelving rock up which men with clubs could climb as easily as itself; is it a matter of inconvenience to us that the Greenland right-whale possessed more blubber than sense, and so allowed itself to be outwitted by the northern whalers, who in their rapacity destroyed their own livelihood? Does it really matter that we never saw a living dodo, or that Wicken Fen was made a preserved area too