Current mood:	tired
Current music:	What's The Matter With You - Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers
Entry tags:	economics, life, philosophy, psychology

A trip to the SF zoo triggers realizations about species endangerment
I helped lead a landscaping project at the SF zoo this morning. Some of the volunteers wore wading boots and extracted weeds from a pit filled with mud. Every single one of them ended up covered in some pretty strong-smelling mud by the end. But at one point I overheard one kid saying to another, "I thought this would be boring and we wouldn't get to do anything fun but pulling stuff out of mud is awesome!"

As a token of appreciation, the zoo let all of us have free access to the zoo for the day. While walking around the primate discovery centre, I was struck by the degree to which other primate species are endangered by human activity. Comparing the population size of humanity with those of other primates casts light on a perspective we don't usually consider. While there are several billion of us on the planet, many other primates number in the thousands. If we take scarcity into account, the life of any other primate would be orders of magnitude more valuable than that of a human being.

That's a hard stance to wrap my head around because we're naturally inclined to empathize with other members of our own species but, as I watched some of these other primates interacting with other, I realized that they exhibit the same complex emotions and social relationships that cause us to empathize with other humans (not unlike elephants). It made me suspect that the mental limitations that allow us to indirectly inflict suffering upon millions people in far-flung parts of the world are probably the same ones that allow us to steadfastly decimate the struggling populations of many other species.