Canem Malum,

Correct. There are too many people, particularly of the Green sort, who think that animals are equivalent to human beings.

" What a piece of work is man?"
exclaims Hamlet in Shakespeare's play.

"How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel! In apprehension,
how like a god! The beauty of the world! The
paragon of animals! And yet ... what is this
quintessence of dust?"

What are we? Hamlet's question is probably
as old as the unique human capacity for self-
awareness, a capacity that extends perhaps hundreds
or thousands of years back into prehistory.

Modern science can give no simple answer to the
question, for who we are - an extraordinarily
complex species - the most intelligent, resourceful,
and adaptable that has ever existed on the planet.

Yet today we do know infinitely more about the human
species than we did even a few years ago, and we have
learned that many traditional ideas about "human nature"
are hopelessly naive and misguided.

We are a PARTICULAR animal, Homo Sapiens - and in order
to fully understand what that entails we need to find out
more about the societies this animal forms, and about the
social behaviour within these societies. Understanding
the evolutionary background is a first step in this process.

Concern for our survival is better addressed if, instead of pointing where we are different from the other animals, we note how much we are like other animals, and the lessons that can be learned from that. One lesson is the great oxidation event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

“The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), sometimes also called the Great Oxygenation Event, Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust,[2] or Oxygen Revolution, was a time period when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean experienced a rise in oxygen, approximately 2.4 billion years ago (2.4 Ga) to 2.1–2.0 Ga during the Paleoproterozoic era.[3] Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggests that biologically produced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and changed Earth's atmosphere from a weakly reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing atmosphere,[4] causing many existing species on Earth to die out.”

The many existing species which died out during the GOE died out because the oxygen they produced as a waste product accumulated until it was toxic to them. Our species, homo sapiens, is busily engaged in producing our world which is inhospitable or toxic to us.

This can be done in many ways. We can pollute the environment so much that it can no longer support us. We can wipe out other species such as the bees which are essential to us. We may wipe out other species and reduce biodiversity to find out too late that these other species were essential to our survival. We can get into an atomic exchange which will wipe out or greatly reduce our numbers. We can continue our uncontrolled population growth which will continue to lead to famine, conflict and outstrip the capacity of the land to support us. We already have on earth millions of refugees from areas which will no longer support them due to conflict or environmental degradation. We seem incapable of acting more sensibly than the organisms that exterminated themselves.

To David F-

It sounds like you are talking about a "Malthusian Catastrophe".

"the propensity for population increase also leads to a natural cycle of abundance and shortages"

A discredited but useful concept is "Production is arithmetic and population is geometric" linear vs exponential.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analysis

It seems that Marx is one of the critiques of Malthus.

"Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that Malthus failed to recognize a crucial difference between humans and other species. In capitalist societies, as Engels put it, scientific and technological "progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population".[33] Marx argued, even more broadly, that the growth of both a human population in toto and the "relative surplus population" within it, occurred in direct proportion to accumulation."

Thanks David F for your comparison of ostensibly wise "visionary" humans with "blind" nature.

I guess there may be a point to the religious view here- though religion too has been known to be expansionist.

Wrong link above...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

No-one or nothing ever bothered about the preservation of species so, why is it so important now ?
Can we prevent it ? No ! Even if we stopped all that we're doing that is bad for the environment, the evolutionary cycle will continue no matter what. We must accept the unpleasant reality that we humans are simply just another kind of life that is destined to eventually disappear.
It could take another thousand years but it will happen.
So, let's focus on stamping out stupidity & those who are hell-bent in propagating it so we can have a nicer existence for the fleeting moments we're here !