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Nobody has answered my question, so I'll ask it again....why do we NEED to protect this bird when it has survived (while supposedly being extinct) without our protection for the 40 years before the refuge was created?
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Again, your premise here is simply not true. The bird had our protection for at least the last 66 years in the National Wildlife Refuge system in Arkansas. The neighboring White River NWR also contains sizeable habitat, and it was established in 1939.
So indeed we have been protecting the bird for at least the last 66 years, even though we weren't aware of it.
So if the argument is that "we haven't been protecting it and yet it survived, so protecting it is not necessary for survival, so we don't need to protect it" then that argument is invalid because the premise is simply not true.
And there is a second reason the argument is invalid: not only is the premise false, but the reasoning is invalid too. The logical assumption is that "if past protection wasn't necessary, then present protection is also unnecessary." This assumption relies on the belief that the threats in the past were equal to the threats in the present, and that simply is not true. Habitat destruction is permanent and ongoing.
Look at it this way: we weren't protecting the bird for the last 300,000 years and yet it survived all the way to the present day. Why do we need to protect it now if it survived for the last 300,000 years?
Your argument is reducible to absurdity; it implies we don't need to protect any species whatsoever.
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Keep in mind, that we don't know for sure that this refuge is it's only habitat
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That's entirely true, but that is not an argument for not protecting other habitat that benefits the bird. It's an argument
in favor of protecting these other habitats.
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....we were wrong when we declared it extinct, we were wrong when we said those who had sighted this bird mistaked for a pileated woodpecker
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We were right that the population was utterly decimated by clearcutting of its habitat. It may not have gone extinct, but it easily could have. It was pure luck that it didn't go extinct.
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now we're assuming that this bird is in danger of becoming extinct . . . I don't buy it.
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It's not an assumption, it's an inference. We are inferring from the facts that (1) the population was decimated; (2) small populations are orders of magnitude more likely to go extinct than large populations from demographic and environmental and genetic stochasticity; (3) scant habitat remains; and (4) remaining habitat is dwindling rapidly.
It's a reasonable inference. Many other bird species have gone extinct under the exact same set of conditions that the woodpecker finds itself in right now.
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i don't think that we need to tie up peoples private forests, prevent them from cutting trees on their own land, or otherwise prevent them from developing land they own.
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OK well this opinion is well beyond the biological facts. If you value private land rights more than you value the bird, then that's a completely different realm of argument.
I'm simply pointing out the biological facts, and I don't think anything I've said is seriously contested by the knowledgeable biologists involved.