Us humans have a lot of neat irony in our lives. People dont even realise it. I dont even know if irony is the right word.. I just saw an example of it the other day that sort of made me think about it.
This may sound like gross generalisation in parts, but its a summary of something I've seen before, and cant think of specific examples of - if that makes any sense.
Ok, so you see a native tribe of people, who have hunted a certain animal all their lives.. the animal drifts into an endangered species list, and they wanna keep hunting it - because for all of the people in that tribe, they've hunted this animal through all of their living history, and cant really imagine life without hunting it. Western society steps in and sees this as terrible.. shocking, awful! And it is of course, extinction of a species is a pretty awful thing, and shows what a total disregard we have for this planet. But what do you think would happen if it was a part of western tradition - say, some animal used in Sunday roasts that suddently drifted into an endangered species list? Imagine if it was cows.. do you think people would switch to Beany Burgers or Tofu burgers in order to save the cow? Somehow I doubt they would.. corporations would drive up the price of burgers, and people would happily pay (maybe not as often) even though they were eating an endangered species - because they always have, and they cant imagine not being able to have a burger.
Also one would have to wonder if people would ever actually know that the cow was becoming extinct.. its meat could simply be replaced by some bioengineered mass without consumers knowing..
Maybe its a bad example.. because the likelyhood of cows becoming extinct is pretty small (Although with the recent BSE related cullings, one can never really know), but it just seems ironic that western society can be so "shocked!" and "horrified" about killing of animals, and in itself be responsible for killing on such a wider scale, with the knowledge in the backs of their minds that if they ever had to change their lifestyles for the sake of the well being of a species, that it would be a rather huge uphill fight..