Humans have long been successful predators, thanks to our advanced cognition, tools and technology. And now a new study examining human predation’s influence on nature reveals some fresh insights, such as the fact that we capture even more terrestrial vertebrate species for medicine, the exotic pet trade and other uses than we do for food—setting us apart as a highly unusual kind of predator.
Predation usually refers to catching and killing prey for food. But for the purposes of their study, Darimont and his team defined it as “any use that removes individuals from wild populations, lethally or otherwise, via processes ranging from local subsistence to global commercial harvesting and trade.
But overall the new research found that only about half of the species humans prey on end up being eaten. “Food use wasn’t as major a use as we expected,” says study co-author Rob Cooke, an ecologist at the U.K. Center for Ecology and Hydrology. “The other half was these diverse uses for clothes and animal feed and poison and manufacturing chemicals.” To Cooke and Darimont, the extent to which animals were taken from the wild to become pets was the most surprising finding.