If you really think killing animals en masse is going to "help the environment", you aren't really thinking at all.
Do you realize what would happen if we stopped killing cows?
The bloody things would be everywhere!
[/dylanmoran]
In seriousness, I can see where he's coming from. I can talk about saving Australia's special snowflake animals all I want, but then we go out and kill kangaroos because they're a pest animal which out-eats our livestock.
I guess it ends up coming down to 'Kill animals which inconvenience us most', which is probably a bad way to see life - other than the fact that cane toads don't really inconvenience me at all. I mean, swimming in a pool with them could lead to some interesting rashes/heart failure, but other than that they usually are just an ugly thing which is on my sidewalk sometimes.
But it's still been drummed into my head from a young age that they are the bane of all native animals, and to not terminate them wherever possible/convenient/unable-to-be-avoided is a cardinal sin.
But that's still part of the strange and rather wavy line of animal eradication. The European bee is the bane of the tiny brown native bees, but I don't run around with a fumigator.
That being said, if I come across a hive of native bees, I'll generally keep an eye on it and make sure nothing goes horribly wrong, and if I saw a bunch of the black-and-yellow bitches swarming it, I'd almost certainly start putting whacks in.
So now I'm curious as to whether that's soft-heartedness or god complex, as I guess true soft-heartedness is 'Don't kill animals, let them sort it out'.
Which, in the current context is nixed, because the developers next-door filling in the swamp was what caused this population boom, and whilst they're eventually gonna starve eachother out in the fullness of time, they're still gonna be breeding and eating and competing, to the misfortune of everything else in the area.
Just like humans do.