Humans, animals and coexistence

         Kingdom Animalia holds a lot of treasure which is unique to itself. From enormous elephants to sprinting Cheetahs and from tiny fingerlings to the mighty blue whale, it is diversified . Aren't we forgetting someone? Oh yes! The Homo sapiens.Yes us humans. Animals have been inhabited this earth millions of years before the humans even came into existence. Even then somehow, we humans managed to dominate these organisms and thus reached the apex of the food or biological pyramid. Being on the top ain't a bad thing but exploiting the other species in this process is definitely bad. And in spite of that  we say that we coexist peacefully with these species. Sounds hilarious, doesn't it ?

        Do we actually live in peace with them and is it really as hard as we make it look like? Well lets see. Today, 31% of the total land on the earth is covered by forest area which is approximately just 4 billion hectares. It has various types of them like the tropics, the savannas, the conifers, the evergreens. In the last few decades, we have seen a great reduction in the forest cover. There are n number of reasons for it like industrialization,  increase in population, climate changes ,etc. Between 1990 to 2016, world has lost approximately 502,000 square miles or area larger than the entire African continent. This is still continuing at alarming rate.  So what about the wildlife living in these regions? Did it get affected or it didn't? The answer seems pretty obvious. "Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years" says WWF. Many species which were abundant in the 20th century are now on the brink of extinction or some even are extinct now. 

         Can this be said as peaceful coexistence? I think no. For the sake of fulfilling our needs we have been exploiting these species from time immeasurable and its still continuing at an unstoppable rate. Like for eg: poaching for skins and tusks, hunting for fun, capturing the animals for various activities, deforestation for making land available for building human civilizations,etc. So much of forest area has totally been cut down for building houses without even thinking about all those species that have been living in that region for centuries. People many a times complain of wild animals being spotted in the cities or around their houses. At such scenarios the animals are put down to avoid danger but the people don't realize that they themselves have barged in the habitat of that poor organism. And that really isn't what we call living in harmony with them.

       There is no absolute number of ways by which this can be solved. But what we can actually do is understand the issue and find out our own ways to solve these problem. We must understand that we are destroying the balance of the nature on this planet which is highly harmful in the long run. Blaming other species for human mistakes can't be a solution to this. Also, regardless of all the efforts of protection or conservation of these animals, the rapid growth of human population and the limited amount of resource is increasing the conflicts within the species. This has therefore led to the belief of many conservationists that many carnivore species cannot inhabit the same area as that of humans but that does not make it legit to wipe out the existence of the species.                  

     As said by Paul Oxton, ' Humankind must learn to understand that life of animals is no less precious than our own'. Thus every human should make an effort to maintain the balance with nature and also realize the importance of animals in this world.