Extinction. Almost every day we learn about another species getting knocked off and joining dinosaurs, passenger pigeons and dodo birds. Let's face reality. A pigeon is a pigeon and considered a flying rat by many city dwellers. A bird named dodo probably didn't have much of a chance for survival to begin with and as much as people are intrigued by dinosaurs, I don't know of anyone who hankers to have them lumbering around our present landscape and I doubt that they would make great pets.

Just think of the size of the clean up bag you'd need when you walked your brontosaurus in the park and there's that embarrassing moment of having to face the irate neighbors because your T-Rex made a snack of Fifi, their toy poodle. An abundance of T-Rex's could lead to the extinction of toy poodles. I will go no further regarding my feelings about that.

Look, we've got maybe 10 million species on the planet. Do we really need all of them?

There are groups of people who feel that creatures like the Roundtail Chub (a fish), Gunnison's Prairie Dog (a rodent, not a dog) and the Preble's meadow jumping mouse (a mouse, OK?) need to be protected. I understand that the Preble's jumping mouse can jump 1.5 feet high. I don't care if it can do back flips, it's a mouse and if the last of its kind was in my house, it would quickly achieve extinction.

In the book Freakonomics, the authors state that there are approximately five thousand spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest. Protecting them could cost the timber industry 46 billion in lost income. That's 9 million dollars an owl. After the Exxon Valdez disaster, a survey found that, in order to avoid a similar ecological disaster, Americans were only willing to pony up thirty one dollars a year. That tells you how willing we are to protect our environment and its creatures. Hey pal, want to buy a cute but very expensive owl?

Most often, as with so many of these "save the species" programs, we are trying to absolve ourselves of the guilt we feel for having caused the problem in the first place. We developed the land that many of these creatures inhabited. Some creatures, we decided, shouldn't share the planet with us. Nobody was screaming, "Save The Whales" when whales had enough commercial value to support the whaling industry. Likewise, I don't recall a movement to boycott beaver hats because trapping beavers required drowning the cute, furry creatures.

But the meanest, cruelest near-extermination was that of the wolf. This magnificent creature was hunted down and shot or poisoned because it had the audacity to occasionally feed on domestic livestock. Actually, I think the real reason was because anti-wolf propaganda like the tale of the three little pigs and little red riding hood allowed people to believe that the wolf was intrinsically evil and in league with the devil and so it was man's duty to eradicate the wolf.

Ironically, today we are paying a lot of money to reintroduce the wolf in some places while we are paying government hunters to kill them in other places. Wouldn't it make sense to trap the ones we're paying to have killed and ship them to places where we'd like to have them?

There is one creature that is near extinction, the California Condor, and I understand why. Here's my theory. Have you ever looked closely at a condor? They are very ugly birds. No condor under normal conditions would find another condor appealing enough to wish to mate with it. What is missing from their natural environment is Condor Bars. Since there are so few condors in the wild, they need a place where they can gather, and, once in the bars, they can get drunk enough to not care how ugly their new partner is. I know it will work because I have seen the same principle at work with humans in LoDo.

My bottom line is that I don't believe every creature on the planet is necessary and that if some of them disappear; the planet is not going to spin off its axis.

And to be perfectly honest, if one day, some creature more intelligent than us decides that maybe it's time for us to go and makes that happen, I'm cool with that. After all, are we really any more valuable than the dodo?