“We all have a responsibility to protect endangered species, both for their sake and for

the sake of our own future generations.” – Loretta Lynch. An endangered animal is when its

population has declined at least 70 percent and the cause of the decline is known or when its

population has declined at least 50 percent and the cause of the decline is not known. A species

is threatened when any species is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable

future throughout all or a significant portion of its range. The total number of animals that are

endangered or threatened is 41,415 species, this means that a lot of animals need our help to

bring them back to where they used to be but in the United States, many people believe the

government should put more effort, time, and money into helping other industries like oil

production which releases pluton in the air and will kill many animals. The agencies that oversee

helping the endangered animals and working towards making the planet more sustainable for the

animals that live on it, including us, do not work well. The reason helping endangered animals is

needed so much is because of things like the monarch butterfly decline, the spotted owl

populations in decline, and the lack of hunting and fishing sustainability to the wildlife they hunt .

Monarch butterflies are iconic so when the monarch butterfly populations are endangered

you know that something must be done to help bring them back to where they were. As the

Washington post put it in their story why monarch butterflies are on the edge of collapse by

Grandoni Dino it says “The species' numbers have dropped between 22% and 72% over the past

decade, according to the new assessment. Monarchs in the Western United States are danger:

The population declined by an estimated 99.9%, from as many as 10 million butterflies in the

1980s to fewer than 2,000 in 2021”. This shows that monarch butterflies are near extinction

compared to where they were in the 1980s. People have many ways to help the monarch

butterflies one of which is people can help the monarch butterflies is by planting milk weed.
Milkweed is the only plant which the monarch butterflies can lay their eggs on which make them

vital for monarch butterflies to survive. As Laufer Peter put it in his article called Could

genetically modified milkweed save the monarch butterfly? “Milkweed is the monarch's sole

host plant. Monarchs lay their eggs only on milkweed. The larvae from those eggs eventually

feed on milkweed, filling them up with a chemical compound that makes them poisonous for

most potential predators. Monarch larvae eat only milkweed. Killing off the milkweed means

killing off the monarchs. And we are killing off the milkweed.” This shows how we humans are

poisoning the milkweed even though it is their only host plant. We are poisoning milkweed

because it is an intrusive plant and spreads quickly people shouldn’t be doing this because if the

monarch butterflies go extinct as it is looking like they may it will cause a ripple effect that will

affect many types of birds as they rely on them as a food source another thing is that they help

pollenate the plants this is important because if followers aren’t pollenated they will not be able

to spread and grow.

spotted owls live in Washington, Oregon, and northern California and their populations

have been on a decline since 1994 and are down to an estimated 2,000 pairs left this means that

they are near extinction and to make matters worse they are still decreasing at about 2.9 percent

each year as the statistic by Tribune Content Agency Graphics shows in their picture “from 1994

to 2007 the spotted owl populations have decreased by 24% across Oregon, Washington, and

California”. As you can see the spotted owl populations desperately need help in saving one way

mankind could do this is by significantly decreasing the amount of lumber coming out of where

the spotted owls live and putting more effort into restoring the forests that they live in. In the last

150 years only about 10% of the forest remain which will do a number of things to shrink the

spotted owl population as the article called Weasels, Not Pandas, Should Be the Poster Animal
for Biodiversity Loss by David Jachowski says that “For small carnivores like weasels, skunks,

and foxes, it's a different story. These species and their relatives have equal or greater impacts on

the ecosystems they inhabit than larger species like wolves”. This shows how small carnivores

have a equal to or greater than impact on the environment this shows why we need to be focusing

more efforts towards saving small carnivores like spotted owls. Some of the impacts are keeping

the mice and other rodent populations in balance instead of the population exploding which is a

bad thing because the rodents will eat farmers crops and other food sources that people rely on to

eat.

Whale hunting has been highly controversial this is because while the vast majority of

countries outlaw whale hunting three do not Japan, Norway, and Iceland. This is a problem

because whales are slowly but surely decreasing in their population meaning if people keep this

up mankind will eventually lose the whales. As Catherine Stihler European Labour Party

Spokesperson on Fisheries Dunfermline wore in her letter “Sir, I am deeply concerned that the

Icelandic Government is to resume commercial hunting of whales (report, Oct 18). Because

European countries cannot agree on one position over whaling we cannot join the International

Whaling Commission and therefore do not have as much decision-making power over the future

of our marine wildlife as we would like”. This shows how the European countries need to agree

on whether or not whale hunting should be legal for now Iceland is taking up whale hunting, and

it is most likely more will follow as nothing is being done to stop it we as of now hunt 1,000 per

year but if more country start, we can. This is bad as whales play a huge part in capturing carbon

from the air at a estimated 33 ton of carbon per whale this shows why we need whales to stay

alive and not go extinct on planet Earth.

 However, some people believe that we should continue the trajectory that we are on this

is because with things like deforestation, whale hunting, and poisoning milkweed they believe

that if we can do it we should be allowed to because it helps us and provides us resources and

that it is the animals responsibility to survive and not ours. The problem with these ideas is that

the animals aren’t surviving and if we don’t do something soon, the entire ecosystem will fall

into mayhem with most animals going extinct and with a few animals thriving in the short term

but once all the food is gone, they will die as well. This is a bad thing because if all of the

animals die off then we will not have any meat to eat, which is a big part of people’s diet, and we

need it to survive. Another problem with the animals dying off is that we need things like bees

and other pollinators to help the food that we grow be able to produce fruits and other food so

without meat and food that we grow we won't have anything to eat which is bad because we will

starve and die along with the animals.

Therefore as you can see animal populations are dropping at a fast rate and we have many

opportunities to do something about it but instead we are doing the exact opposite and hurting

the populations more by things such as poisoning what little milk weed we have left over and in

doing so are killing the monarch butterfly offspring meaning that we are halting the population.

We are also causing deforestation in places that are animals' habitats that are already endangered

instead of trying to restore the forests which will in turn restore the population bit by bit. Another

thing we are doing is whale hunting. This is bad because whales are slowly but surely decreasing

in their population, meaning if people keep this up mankind will eventually lose the whales. As

you can see by all of this overwhelming evidence people need to step up and protect the animals

to in turn protect everything on earth.

 Bibliography:

Grandoni Dino

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711028476/OVIC?u=pl2673&sid=bookmark-

OVIC&xid=73691916

Laufer Peter

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711980190/GIC?u=pl2673&sid=bookmark-

GIC&xid=d8dea3e6

Tribune Content Agency Graphics

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CT3294260461/OVIC?u=pl2673&sid=bookmark-

OVIC&xid=c1644e5b

David Jachowski

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/JEWUXA044475807/OVIC?u=pl2673&sid=bookmark-

OVIC&xid=5a3c1b4a
Catherine Stihler

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A153176556/GIC?u=pl2673&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=cd572a0e