Through environmental education, we can all work together to change the attitudes and behaviors that have led to the endangerment of predator species and help save them from extinction. To appreciate predators, we must first understand their roles in wildlife communities. Because predators must kill other animals in order to survive, many myths about them have evolved over the centuries in many cultures. The plight of cheetahs symbolizes the problems that many predators face throughout the world. If we are to conserve healthy wildlife populations in the 21st century, we must understand the ways of animals and recognize their importance to our survival.
Humans are predators and carnivores.
We compete with wild animals for natural resources. Because of growing human populations and over-consumption of the earth's resources, the world is losing wild places and species as the demand for food, minerals, lumber, and other resources increase. Two hundred years ago there were fewer then one billion people living on the planet. Today, about five billion people live on the planet, and there may be over six billion of us by the year 2000. Extinction is a natural process, and for hundreds of millions of years, plants and animals have become extinct.