The world is a complex creation of humans, animals, birds and countless other living organisms. Of all the living beings, man, the social animal made a splendid progress from generations. Evolving from the stone-age to now having robots to assist our work, we became slaves of technology. In all the notable progress that we have and continue to make, the damage has been equally monstrous. Humans are responsible for taking away 83% of wild animals. And the latest research also shows that we are responsible for cancers among the wild animals. Science and medicine are developing ways to deal with the malignant disease in humans without realising how we have been passing it on to the wild animals.

The life of this planet is so vast that a human population of 7.6 billion people accounts for just being 0.01% of it. But come civilisation and progress, humans have been responsible for the destruction of 83% of wild mammals till date! A new assessment done on the life of planet gave some shocking data that we should be ashamed of. 13% of the life on this planet is in the form of bacteria, plants and trees constitute a majority of the portion with 82%. The rest of the creatures including the fungi and fish constitute to 5%. This data may seem impossible to believe but 83% of the wild mammals have faced the brunt of civilisation and further development.

The mammals have become livestock and have reduced in numbers significantly. There are 60% of mammals and only 4% of them are in the wild category. The destruction of wild habitat for development has resulted in mass extinction, the sixth one in the Earth's history of billion years. Not going too behind, in the last 50 years we have lost 50% of the Earth's animals.

On comparisons to the time before man became a farmer and then an industrialist, the figures show a major decline. Only 1/6th of the wild animals have remained. The human supremacy being the minutest population to represent has taken away 83% of lives of the wild mammals. In the years to come, these figures are not going to be impressive for sure. It could your chicken next! To give it a number, a biomass of 7,500 times more than the human population has been destroyed.

Cause of cancer

A popular impression that only humans are victims of cancer, gets dismissed as we also become a facilitator of the disease to our fellow beings. Mathieu Giraudeau and Tuul Sepp, two PhD researchers at the School of Life Sciences in Arizona State University, and Kevin McGraw, state that humans are a cause of the deadly disease in the wild animals. “We are changing the environment to be more suitable for ourselves and these changes are impacting many species negatively on many different levels, including the probability of developing cancer,” said Sepp. The two did their study along with a team of some international researchers. They did an extensive study on human activities that have been affecting the animals.

The chemical and physical pollution in oceans and waterways, accidental release of radiation into the atmosphere from nuclear plants and the accumulation of microplastics in both land and water based environments, exposure to pesticides all are contributing to health issues in animals. “We recently published several theoretical papers on this topic, but this time, we wanted to highlight the fact that our species can strongly influence the prevalence of cancer in many other species of our planet,” said Giraudeau. The study calls humans an oncogenic species responsible for altering the environment in a manner that is causing cancer in other wild species.

With the gap between the human and animal contact thinning down, the human activities effect are directly affecting the animal lives. One of the examples they cite is animals living closer to the cities can get affected by lights in the nights and it can damage their hormones to an extent of causing cancer.

These recent studies state how our efficiency in exploiting the resources at our will has taken away the will to live from other mammals in the world. While we boast of development and strive to achieve more, we have clearly lost the environmental balance. It highlights the dominion of humanity in an environment, which is failing to remain as one.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 23, 2018 12:32 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).