>You're pursuing this pet idea of yours to the exclusion of the facts and values of the people who address these ideas regularly.

I'm pursuing this idea because it has wide-ranging applications. It explains why otherwise "rational" intelligent westerners make no sense a lot of the time. It is very easily explained if I just refer to the Bible.

>apex predators perform a valuable service by keeping the prey populations in check.

Even that is not true. A apex-predator-less ecosystem can function just as well, albeit differently. Look up bottom-up trophic cascade.

>Without them, humans would have to go hunt which is additional labor.

Not necessarily. Bottom-up trophic cascade takes care of that. However, hunting will be more available, reducing reliance on industrial food farming.

>Also its clear that humans wouldn't be able to hunt the same populations in the same amounts in the same way, which would have effects on the prey population, which would affect the rest of the ecosystem.

There is no need to copy a particular behavior. The species in the environment can epigenetically change to adapt to various predation patterns or lack thereof.

>Any ecologist could explain the above, it has nothing to do with the west.

A Chinese or a Japanese or an Indian or an African can in fact say the same thing, because they most likely studied the same things written by western academics. However, they are not so strictly married to those ideas, unless of course, they have been brought up as Christians.

For example, the ideas behind animal cognition and intelligence have been heavily suppressed in the west because animals are not supposed to have a "soul". They are supposed to be mindless automatons. This is rarely the case with non-western scientists.

>There are none, at least not on Earth.

Sure, in a world where God created Adam and Eve and other animals to accompany them. In the real world, humans co-evolved with very specific eco-systems and have nothing to do with most of the rest of it.

>They provide a check on disease by encouraging competitor organisms through biodiversity. They provide a future stock of biological goods and biological inputs for industrial goods that will be used when discovered to be useful. They also interact with our ecosystem because all the ecosystems are connected and make one planet-Earth-sized ecosystem.

That's a huge leap of faith. Most other animals, which are not Christians, attack other predators which are their competitors all the time. They would happily get rid of them if they had the means. In fact, Europe got rid of a lot of predators before Christianity spread. The rest of the world did too, before the west spread Christianity to them, either as the religion as a part of the imperial era or as the education that came out from it spread to universities everywhere.

>They are however the other organisms are busy evolving responses to these potential pandemic-causing organisms and that both keeps them in check and allows us to use those organisms to respond to the pandemics when they (inevitably) arise. Pandemics and plagues are more prevalent with less biodiversity because there is less competition once an organism evolves a means to take advantage of a vulnerability.

Biodiversity of what? Bacteria and viruses? Or mammals? If we didn't have pangolins, some of which are endangered btw, we'd probably not have COVID-19.