I'm starting to believe it was never that great of a system. I think many recent events around the world have really removed much of the veneer and we're seeing we aren't as far from feudalism as we wanted to believe. To keep it simple as I believe class systems work a bit different between the US and Europe, but it seems the only real change has been the merchant class replacing the nobility. With governments essentially outsourcing to industry the drafting of legislation and regulation, they've maintained their positions of power, and we're allowed to be peasants as long as we're good consumers. No one seems to like when we question where things come from or what the overall price of goods and services are.

I deleted a reply to another thread yesterday about America's 2 party system as I didn't want to get into it with that many people in a political community, but here, the right feels like the robber barons of the early 1900s, who want to toss all the regulations on industry and just bleed everything dry for what it's worth, and our left feels like the colonialists who see the majority of us as lesser people that just need to be more like them, while not allowing most of us to have the success many of them were born into.

To steer back to our actual topic, killing is cheap, quick, and to the goals of both of the mentioned groups above, it does accomplish their goals. Whether that be people, animals, or the environment, the limitations seem to vary by country, but we all seem to be compromised to a large extent. There was another UK article posted on Lemmy yesterday about how when you go outside now, you hear silence more than seeing the insects, birds, and other animals many of us saw when we were kids (I assume were talking about those of us around the 40+ age at this point), and we have the same types of articles here. There were so many butterflies, fireflies, mantises, grasshoppers, rabbits, owls, foxes, and deer here when I was a child, and where I live feels so devoid of life now in comparison. I can only imagine what it was like before the age of industry. That we can see and feel this loss, but still keep heading down this path makes me ill.

My thoughts on the owl situation here it to let them hybridize. The native Spotted Owls era seems to have passed. We've destroyed too much of what they need, and forests need 100-200 years to really support life like this. Current breeding and release programs for this particular owl don't work well. The Barred Owl is very adaptable, seemingly too well for its own good. The are currently cross-breeding and have resultant children. Perhaps this new owl could preserve some of the Spotted Owl genes, instead of us losing it altogether. But the hybrids are currently killed as well. Some success seems better than none, and this seems to be nature's solution to what we're doing. The planet seems to know better than we do what works.

I hope this wasn't too negative and gloomy. I typically avoid this stuff here, as I'm more about the conservation than the politics and wish to spend my time doing more positive posting, but they very much overlap. Many of the politics here are a bit too extreme for me, and I just don't want to get sucked into that, but this seemed a reasonable place to share some of my thoughts.

Thanks for that great explanation!