If you've ever gone to a wildlife park or nature reserve you're sure to have seen signs instructing you to not feed the wild animals. And there's a good reason for this. Feeding them makes us feel good but longer term the practice has negative ramifications for the animals. Over time they become dependent on humans and neglect survival instincts honed over thousands of years. For instance bears over time will shorten their hibernation period while their hunting and foraging skills deteriorate. With more r-selected species human feeding promotes spectacular population growth.All of which is ok until something goes wrong and humans can no longer improve nature. This could - and does - happen in the case of bears when the parks are cut off by heavy snow or other adverse natural conditions. In such circumstances large numbers of them starve or freeze to death. In the case of over-population natural calamities such as drought will result in a large die-off of the affected species.
I thought of this when reading an article by some Irish philanthropist who focuses on Ethiopia. ("I have two adopted Ethiopian daughters" he reminds us frequently). Apparently that country is yet again headed for famine. Insert boilerplate cut-and-paste doom porn here 'worst crisis in living memory, millions will die.....unless you send money NOW'. You know the drill. This guy should have heeded what Charles Darwin wrote many years ago. “One day something brought to my recollection Malthus’s “Principles of Population”. I thought of his clear exposition of “the positive checks to increase”–disease, accidents, war, and famine–which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of civilised peoples."
You see, since the time of the 1985 Ethiopian Crisis (which Bob Geldof exploited to relaunch his failing career) that country's population has tripled! Yes, tripled, from 32 million in 1975 to 101.4 million today. Any chance that this has something to do with the famine? Learning: Don't feed the bears.
And here's another learning: "Liberal" virtue-signallers are the worst hypocrites on the planet. Deep down they know that encouraging Ethiopians to breed at unsustainable levels inevitably leads to vastly greater suffering than had nature been allowed to take its course. But virtue-signalling to their peers trumps all. And now of course the reviled Whitey is being called on to once again rescue the situation. For all the thanks we'll get.
And here's another learning: "Liberal" virtue-signallers are the worst hypocrites on the planet. Deep down they know that encouraging Ethiopians to breed at unsustainable levels inevitably leads to vastly greater suffering than had nature been allowed to take its course. But virtue-signalling to their peers trumps all. And now of course the reviled Whitey is being called on to once again rescue the situation. For all the thanks we'll get.