WI humans kill all the wild animals

What if there was no attempt at conservation at all, and humans in the first half of the twentieth century just kept slaughtering wild animals until none were left by 1950, just domesticated beasts and insects?

I just found out today that the elephant population in Africa fell from 20 million before the Berlin Conference, to 10 million by 1900, to 1 million by 1970, to 352,00 today. But the decrease did slow over time. That is alot of elephants killed in the nineteenth century. But the pace slackened, as some people tried to save the elephants. What effects would have happened if people just finished them off in the early twentieth century instead?

This falls on the borderline of chat but I think having no conservationist movement is a legitimate alternative course of history.
 
I doubt that humans are able do that and probably on some point there will be some conservationists.

But even if humans would do that, it would be huge ecologic disaster.
 
Possible, but a super-human effort is required. Remember that slaughtering an entire species requires logarithmic efforts in the later stages. IOW Tracking the last few huffalumps requires huge amounts of time and effort because so few remain. Also consider that the last surviving huffalump will be the brightest, shiest and fastest member of its species. Cost of hunting increases as the number of wild huffalumps decreases.
The only incentive will be to hunt the huffalump for some "magical" properties ...... similar to the way Asians prize rhinos' horns for alleged "medicinal" benefits ....... or Sharks' fins as a luxury food.
Only fabulously wealthy consumers will be to afford the last huffalump.

If I may make an analogy: we will never extract the last litre of petroleum from this planet because the last litre will be so deep so far off-shore and so crude that drilling costs will exceed market value.
IOW the last litre of petroleum will cost more to extract that it will earn in sales.
 
i suppose you can get that whole desert effect you see often. Ecologically the flora is gonna go rampant as no herbivores are gonna eat the plants, causing a lot of problems for humans. Eventually though, everything will just dry out since there are no animals spreading seeds anymore. no proper fertilization either. Unless humans are able to keep up.

With big animals its easy to exterminate them(look at the bison), with the smaller animals, mostly the birds its practically impossible.
 
I don't think you are going to get rid of all wild animals... we could certainly have wiped out a lot of the big ones... elephants, rhinos, tigers are hovering on the edge now, and without conservation efforts, would have been gone already. But in spite of massive efforts, we can't get rid of coyotes in America, rabbits in Australia, or cane toads anywhere.
 
I don't think you are going to get rid of all wild animals... we could certainly have wiped out a lot of the big ones... elephants, rhinos, tigers are hovering on the edge now, and without conservation efforts, would have been gone already. But in spite of massive efforts, we can't get rid of coyotes in America, rabbits in Australia, or cane toads anywhere.

Bengal tigers at least are on the rise, which is why conservation efforts have focussed so pointedly on the Sumatran subspecies these days (certainly the most common captive subspecies in Australasia).

Anyway, as said, enormous extinction events would be a complete horror-show, not just from a moral standpoint, but for ourselves. Every species plays a role in the food chain, the nitrate cycle, in fertilising and spreading plants and in preventing them from taking over. Obviously we need trees to produce the oxygen we breathe, but without, say, many species of birds, monkeys, sloths, or other arboreal animals (and several terrestrial species), the trees won't reproduce. These animals need predators to keep them from profilerating too much and too often as well. There is a reason a lot of places are looking into 'rewilding'. It's not just for the tourists and hippies. Biodiversity is important for all life on Earth, us included.
 
Insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. With over 1m species and making up 50% or more of all known living organisms, they would be next to impossible to totally wipe out. In a total thermonuclear WW3 confrontation for example, it is said one of the few species which would thrive would be cockroaches as they can survive some of the worst effects of radiation.
 
Insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. With over 1m species and making up 50% or more of all known living organisms, they would be next to impossible to totally wipe out. In a total thermonuclear WW3 confrontation for example, it is said one of the few species which would thrive would be cockroaches as they can survive some of the worst effects of radiation.
Indeed. Humans are pretty useless at controlling insects or even larger creature like jelly fish.
 
This falls on the borderline of chat but I think having no conservationist movement is a legitimate alternative course of history.

It certainly is. But the biggest effects would be of the smaller species which no one really cares about, which would go extinct, as well as likewise the megafauna which would also go extinct. I highly doubt people could ever kill all the coyotes in America, and even if they did, then feral dogs would just take over their niche. I'm skeptical as to whether people could kill all the deer in America, considering the resilience of the species, unless you saw bands of hunters going into the woods just to kill as many deer as possible. Unlike buffalo, which had a major commercial (their skin) and military (denying them to native groups) purpose, deer serve no such purpose, so there's no incentive to go massively kill all of them. Would there less deer than OTL, certainly. But would deer be in danger of extinction? No. Not until the 21st century at least, and even then, a lot of people would be glad to know there's no risk of deer collisions anymore since there's not many deer left to collide with, although venison will be sorely missed by all those who have tasted it.

And then what about the fish? We could overfish our oceans easily as we've proven, but what about sportfishing in lakes and rivers? That's a lot harder to exhaust those stocks even if it isn't on a commercial level, so that's still tons of interaction with wildlife people can have.

And at some point, the overfishing will have ramifications politically, and I mean beyond the communities devastated by the end of the fisheries they relied on. It would rely on a full transition to aquaculture and factory farming of fish to prevent that. I think by destroying nature that much, you're gonna make an environmentalist movement regardless.
 
Possible, but a super-human effort is required. Remember that slaughtering an entire species requires logarithmic efforts in the later stages. IOW Tracking the last few huffalumps requires huge amounts of time and effort because so few remain. Also consider that the last surviving huffalump will be the brightest, shiest and fastest member of its species. Cost of hunting increases as the number of wild huffalumps decreases.
The only incentive will be to hunt the huffalump for some "magical" properties ...... similar to the way Asians prize rhinos' horns for alleged "medicinal" benefits ....... or Sharks' fins as a luxury food.
Only fabulously wealthy consumers will be to afford the last huffalump.

If I may make an analogy: we will never extract the last litre of petroleum from this planet because the last litre will be so deep so far off-shore and so crude that drilling costs will exceed market value.
IOW the last litre of petroleum will cost more to extract that it will earn in sales.
Nonsense, the biggest factor driving species extinction is habitat loss. Elephants need large areas of land to supply a single animal, so you only need the land to be polluted, invaded by feral animals, tilled or turned into man-made structures for the extinction to happen. For animals that can only live in cooler temperatures at higher elevations, it may be that all is needed is for the snow to stop falling enough or for the weather patterns to change. For other animals it might be the length of the season that changes (climate change has been shown to cause many extinctions and also changes in animal and plant behaviour). Also, many of the people hunting these animals are very poor but also very hungry and it is worth their while to spend a lot of effort to shoot the animal to eat it, and/or sell its ivory.
 
Possible, but a super-human effort is required. Remember that slaughtering an entire species requires logarithmic efforts in the later stages. IOW Tracking the last few huffalumps requires huge amounts of time and effort because so few remain. Also consider that the last surviving huffalump will be the brightest, shiest and fastest member of its species. Cost of hunting increases as the number of wild huffalumps decreases.
The only incentive will be to hunt the huffalump for some "magical" properties ...... similar to the way Asians prize rhinos' horns for alleged "medicinal" benefits ....... or Sharks' fins as a luxury food.
Only fabulously wealthy consumers will be to afford the last huffalump.

If I may make an analogy: we will never extract the last litre of petroleum from this planet because the last litre will be so deep so far off-shore and so crude that drilling costs will exceed market value.
IOW the last litre of petroleum will cost more to extract that it will earn in sales.

We completely wiped out way too many species IOTL for it to be that impossible. The last individuals of a species may or may not die by our hand directly, but we can, do, and have brought plenty of species to the point where they can't sustain themselves.
 
yep, we definitly could have wiped out the American Bison, nearly there and there were millions stretched across a continent.
 

Wallet

Banned
2/3rd of all wildlife on Earth is going to be gone by 2020. This with conservation.

Let's say Stalin doesn't do any purges. The Soviets are prepared for the Naxi invasion and steamroll into Germany. They quickly occupy all of mainland Europe.

For what ever reason nuclear technology never gets off the ground.

It's becomes a never ending war like (1984) between the Soviets, Allies, and Japanese fighting for Africa, Middle East, and India.

Eventually the world is stripped dry of animals. All of the resources have been used up. No population control, as the nations of the world encourage larger families to have more soldiers, workers, and farmers.

More industry leads to more pollution. More people need more farms.
 
2/3rd of all wildlife on Earth is going to be gone by 2020. This with conservation.

Let's say Stalin doesn't do any purges. The Soviets are prepared for the Naxi invasion and steamroll into Germany. They quickly occupy all of mainland Europe.

For what ever reason nuclear technology never gets off the ground.

It's becomes a never ending war like (1984) between the Soviets, Allies, and Japanese fighting for Africa, Middle East, and India.

Eventually the world is stripped dry of animals. All of the resources have been used up. No population control, as the nations of the world encourage larger families to have more soldiers, workers, and farmers.

More industry leads to more pollution. More people need more farms.

whilst i do appreciate you making a link with a world war, i don't see how a world war is going to wipe out all wildlife. What it would mostly do is wipe out humans, who then won't beable to wipe out wildlife. The only factor of a war that could massivly kill the wildlife are nuclear weapons. But they can't do the type of damage to a species to actually wipe them out. Unless the radiation will cause genetic dysfunctions leading to infertility and short lives. But thats stretching it.
 

Wallet

Banned
whilst i do appreciate you making a link with a world war, i don't see how a world war is going to wipe out all wildlife. What it would mostly do is wipe out humans, who then won't beable to wipe out wildlife. The only factor of a war that could massivly kill the wildlife are nuclear weapons. But they can't do the type of damage to a species to actually wipe them out. Unless the radiation will cause genetic dysfunctions leading to infertility and short lives. But thats stretching it.
I was just thinking how war is bad environmental and that a never ending global war might do it
 
We could maybe wipe out a lot of the megafauna by hunting, but we can't kill off everything that isn't an insect. We'll never do in the Norway Rat or the Rock Pidgeon, as obvious examples, and I cannot imagine anyone psychotic enough to hunt voles or hummingbirds e.g. (Rodents in general are a very hard sell, here.) And there are still very remote regions that are reasonably safe from us even today, like the Congo or the Amazon, or even to an extent Patagonia.

We're more likely to cause an extinction event through climate change.
 
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