Badger Badger Badger

[HopAlongBunny]

I remember, some time ago, a thread about badger elimination.
Turns out they engineer the landscape removing dead/diseased carcasses from circulation.
Warning! This may endanger any memories you harbour from Wind in the Willows:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...ses-scientists

[Tristuskhan]

Badger elimination is a shitty business anyway, as is extermination of any local fauna.

Besides scavenging, badgers are also important builders. Their hideouts are often confiscated (or occupied after badgers leave) by foxes and rabbits (?!). Badgers are the only competent diggers in heavy clayish ground.

Badgers are mostly vegetarian, but females gestating or lactating are HUGE predators of rodents at the time of the year rodent regulation is crucial.

Crucial, then. Killing badgers in order to try (unsuccesfully, mind you) to protect overfragile mutant cattle is just one more symptom of how stupid we still are as a species.

That's almost Trumpesque: my cattle dies, I shoot badgers, does it save my cattle, no, but I showed everyone I have some will to act.

[HopAlongBunny]

This is in the same vein:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...and-predators/

Turns out they remove a lot of stuff that can cause us problems.
It's heart-warming to think they look after us

[Fragony]

Badgers are kinda assholes, you don't see them very much here gladly

[Husar]

You guys are all on the wrong boat...

https://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-a...ecil-the-lion/

By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep the animals at the top of the food chain alive. And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of their prey.

And....more...advanced than that:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-...ies-1613342963

And we're already starting to think along these lines. Owing to the advent of gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9, scientists are proposing that we edit the genes of wild animals on the fly. We would do so en masse by engaging in "gene drives" where preferential genes would be driven through wild populations of animals. The end result would be the emergence of "new" species more to our liking. Today, there are already proposals to reduce malarial mosquitoes using this very technique.
[...]
Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience and sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity. For better or worse, power over the lives of all sentient beings on the planet is now within our grasp.

We need to bio-engineer badgers!

[Montmorency]

You guys are all on the wrong boat...

https://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-a...ecil-the-lion/



And....more...advanced than that:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-...ies-1613342963



We need to bio-engineer badgers!

There's also a case to be made that taking time to speculate on such a far-fetched issue is unethical in itself, because one could be using that time to think about actually helping people (or animals).

On the other hand, that would make every one of us here on the Org a lazy and uncaring .

[HopAlongBunny]

The problem is that we don't really have efficient ways to deal the naturally occurring biological waste that's everywhere.
Predators and scavengers remove waste as a breeding ground for stuff that could really cause us problems.
As to bio-engineering our way past it all; sure, I mean We must be able to devise better solutions than millions of years of evolution could possibly come up with

[Kagemusha]

You guys are all on the wrong boat...

https://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-a...ecil-the-lion/



And....more...advanced than that:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-...ies-1613342963



We need to bio-engineer badgers!

If we want to get rid of the planets predatory species. Easiest way is to start WW3, because humans are by far the most populous predator mammal on this planet.. And most ruthless.. Badgers are cute (Ive stumbled into one as a child on a forest path and we stared each other for half a minute before the badger run away to the foliage), they eat vermins like moles and are not really of any kind of harm to humans.

[Viking]

You guys are all on the wrong boat...

https://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-a...ecil-the-lion/



And....more...advanced than that:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-...ies-1613342963



We need to bio-engineer badgers!

We should probably err on the side of caution and exterminate all life on the planet in case networks of communicating bacteria form sentient entities.

[Husar]

There's also a case to be made that taking time to speculate on such a far-fetched issue is unethical in itself, because one could be using that time to think about actually helping people (or animals).

On the other hand, that would make every one of us here on the Org a lazy and uncaring .

But that is not necessarily true. If we were still caring about Polio victims (direct action) instead of having thought about how to create a vaccine (delayed action), would the suffering be less today and overall?
As the article mentions, genetic engineering is already in our grasp with CRISPR. And the idea of using this on Mosquitoes is already in serious consideration today.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sc...-10120902.html

Just don't listen to the naysayers, if anything backfires we can just engineer al life out of existence as Viking suggests.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Badgers bother the bejeebers out of me. I simply cannot figure a way to pen them from the front at all.