Hello everyone! 🙂 Welcome to the last and final post of this series. While it is a controversial topic that I would not have read thought about, it has been a fulfilling and enjoyable experience learning more about it.

Anyways, the article of interest in my last two posts brought up a very valid point. Other factors like habitat loss would possibly be more severe factors that lead to biodiversity loss.  7,000 hectares of vegetation was cleared in New South Wales from 2015 to 2016, rising by 800% from 2013 and endangering koala populations. This coincided with a record low of conservation measures in a decade. Australia has come up with the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2017, yet it has little impact as it still ‘allows farms and landholders to self-assess whether they need to make a formal application to clear land using satellite maps‘. Maybe resources should have been diverted to tackle this problem instead of the feral cat cull. Australia definitely needs to increase stricter regulations on environmental issues to save their treasured native wildlife.

Also, I left out one question from my survey and here it is:

This was the first question that I asked in the survey. In retrospect, I realised that this question only asks if they knew that these terms were different. I wanted to know if people were like me and didn’t know that they alluded to separate lines of reasoning. I probably should have asked respondents about whether they thought animal welfare and conservation were separate issues instead? It would have given me a better indication of whether people knew the differences. If we take the results to suggest the responses of this question, it appears that many people do know the differences. However, I hope that this blog has been informative and provided you guys with new insights regarding this topic. I definitely didn’t know that this was such a divisive subject among animal welfare advocates and conservation biologists at first!

This concludes my final post. Thanks to Dr Coleman and everyone else who has read and commented on my blog! 🙂

– Amanda

 

Reference List:

Pie chart made using Canva

Featured image: “Koala” by jcoterhals is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0