Imagine that you’re driving down a side street in a suburban area, just outside of a major city. You are driving at around twenty five miles per hour, when suddenly, a squirrel runs into the middle of the road. You slam on the breaks, to not hurt the squirrel and injure it. You wait and see if it will run out from under the car. It runs out and you breathe a sigh of relief for not killing it. Small animals, such as squirrels and raccoons, have become more and more accustomed to people and less scared of them. This is because their habitats are being torn down to build brand new buildings, and the animals living there have nowhere else to go.
When a business decides to move to a new location, they leave their old building standing and build a brand new building on some undeveloped land. By building on this land, humans force the species living there to relocate to somewhere different, or to adapt to the new surroundings. Most of them adapt to the new surroundings. The animals soon realize that where there are people, there is food, and where there is food, they will not go hungry. They then become less afraid of people and will run across roads in front of cars to get food.
If businesses stopped developing new buildings in new areas, and remodeled an older, empty building, the encounters with the animals will decrease. In most cities and the suburban areas surrounding the city, you will find many empty buildings. Especially now, with many businesses going out of business and leaving their empty buildings standing, when another business could just remodel the empty one instead of building a whole new store. When driving down some of the main roads, I have noticed that about twenty five percent of the buildings I see are empty and abandoned. I have also noticed that just outside of suburban areas, more and more lots are being used for condos and houses. So why do people have to build on undeveloped land and why don’t they just tear down the empty buildings and do something with them?
Another cause of the increasing interactions with small animals is urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is due to the ever growing population and their need to own a home with space enough to have a backyard. People also move to new areas because they feel the school system is better, they want a bigger house, and a bigger plot of land to live on. If there are only two people living in a house, they do not need to be living in a really big house that takes up a lot of land. That land was a habitat for wild animals that got forced out of their home. In April 2007, National Geographic Magazine published “Urban Sprawl” by John G. Mitchell, which states “While I fished or hunted, my father drove wooden stakes into the ground at the corners of his house lots. Now Mayview is just another old subdivision, and the north edge of Greater Cincinnati is miles beyond it, rolling inexorably toward a confluence with Dayton in the once and former cornfield of Butler and Warren Counties.” Mitchell is describing what a row of houses down in Ohio is now. It used to be a big forest where one could go and see wildlife like he used to when he was a child.
Urban sprawl pushes the wildlife into a smaller area to live in, and they have to adapt to the humans who now live there. Urban sprawl is increasing at a rapid rate, which is not giving the animals time to adjust or find some place new to live, and more and more interactions between humans and wildlife are occurring. People need to stop developing new living areas or new buildings for offices or stores so the wildlife can have a place to live, and a place to have food to eat. We have to find ways to protect their habitat. What will happen if all the wildlife was gone because they had nowhere else to go after people took their homes to build houses and buildings on?
The wildlife documentary Planet Earth from the Discovery Channel and BBC brings the beauty of the animal world right into your home. It shows different kinds of habitats ranging from the South Pole to the rainforest to grasslands, and if people keep taking land from these habitats the wildlife will have nowhere to go and will eventually die out. Even the little pond or small forest by your house is a habitat for small wildlife, and if that gets taken away from them, they will not adapt and die out.
