Question: If half the animals on earth died out (not including humans), how would that affect human life?

Anabel Martinez Lyons answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 9:47 am

An excellent question, and exactly as Ella has mentioned above, we are unfortunately in a world where that is happening to some extent! Many species are either endangered in the wild, or have become wholly dependent on human conservation to stay alive (see an example of Bengal tigers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation-reliant_species). However, to answer your question literally, I think we can look at it in two ways: if half of all the animals of each species died out equally (half of the elephants, half of the rhinos, etc.), I think it would be possible to focus on expanding those populations and keeping those species in existence (with a lot of help from international organisations and governments all working together). However, if half of all the current animal species died out (all elephants, all rhinos, etc.), I think that would be a lot worse! Especially if they were animals that made up a large part of our diets globally (chickens, pigs, cows, fish, etc.). In that case, we’d have to radically change both 1) how we grew food (focusing on growing enough crops especially) and 2) what made up our normal diets substituting in a lot more grains and fruits and vegetables than fish and meat (and even think about animal products that we rely on like eggs). That all said, the one animal (or insect technically) we definitely couldn’t live without is the bee, since we need them to pollinate all the plants that both we and our livestock eat! There is definitely a fine balance between our existence and that of many of the animal species around us :-).