I'd eat the animal. Looks yummy :3

An animal has to eat, it's hard to tell an animal not to eat a certain plant.

I have to agree with Mizzou, you can't tell an animal to change its diet. If you're that worried about the plant, try to get some seeds and plant your own plants.

Circle of Life
That plant may actually need that animal to eat it in order to reproduce. There are some plants seeds that actually need to go through an animal's digestive system (ex. cassowaries in Aussie have a certain acid in their stomach that wears off a protective coating in seeds...there's something like 14 rain forest plants that depend on it going through their system in order to be able to activate once delivered back out of their system). I'd say life usually knows what it's doing!

I'd just let nature take its course. An animal eating a plant is simply the circle of life, as someone else mentioned, isn't it? Nature has a way of balancing itself out. It's humans who are the ones to mess up that balance =/

Hmmm...true.If it weren't for humans,plants and animals would not be endangered.Then,the question would have been "what would you do if you saw an animal eating a plant".Answer's quite simple:do nothing.it's nature's course.
So I agree too

@ KTC - you'll eat the poor animal?! what's wrong wid veggies? xD

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I thought you said endangered animals.

i'm chinese, we eat anything that moves. :3 And I'm not a big veggie eater.

@ivana: certain species of giraffes and i think most elephant species are endangered.

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I see...
*permits herself a small smile*

I agree with KTC

^_^

Find another plant that the animal likes and lure it away with it XD
But if any such plant isn't around... then you'll just have to let nature take its course I guess.

I would take some leaves or cut a branch of plant if plant can again grow by the branch or at least i would take a part of the plant by which it can regrow and then will allow the animal to eat the plant.

I don't think that humans are responsible for keeping endangered species alive any more than endangered species are responsible for keeping humans alive. Yes, we are responsible for wiping out many species of creatures, but species are being wiped out regardless of whether or not we had a hand in it.

I frequently see and hear people say that we are destroying the planet, destroying the world. I disagree. We aren't destroying the planet, we are destroying ourselves.

No matter what we do, we don't have the capacity to hurt nature enough. We will indubitably kill ourselves first. Once we get to that point, nature will repair itself as if though we were never here. Abandoned gas stations get covered in vines and weeds in a matter of years. Earth has existed for billions of years, and human civilization has not existed for more than 10,000. If the earth had existed for 24 hours, then all human civilization would be no more than 1/5 of a second.

@canta: so what would you do in the situation described?

@Canta
I disagree. Humans have done LOTS to the world to harm it - developing and dumping of toxic wastes (and polluting in general), destroying important ecosystems (e.g. rainforests, marshlands), hunting certain species to extinction (e.g. the passenger pigeon) or near-extinction are but a few examples. Even if species die out naturally, we are at least speeding up this process and throwing off the balance of nature.

I agree that we are destroying ourselves, but by destroying the natural world around us, we are still destroying ourselves.

@Canta
I agree with Aeternus on this one. Just take a look at our usage of non-renewable energy sources...that's not something that nature can just heal up quickly. Humans are definitely affecting the balance of nature-the fear is if we go too far and do something that can't be undone.

If I saw an endangered animal eating an endangered plant, I would first congratulate myself on recognizing the plant, and maybe the animal too depending on what it was.
by this point the animal would have run away because it would sense my presence & be spooked.

Unless we're friends. in that case, I would offer it some nachos instead & it wouldn't have to eat the plant. Nachos are so much better anyway.

------
Regarding extinction...
Man, we humans are horrible. if only we'd realized this sooner the dinosaurs might still be alive.
and unicorns too.

ok, more seriously, Just by existing & using the most basic of tools, we humans are affecting the balance that would otherwise exist. We hunt deer (even with bows and arrows) that affects the food source for wolves. We farm, and train dogs to chase away the wolves, so deer don't have enough hunters to keep their population low enough to avoid disease, which kills even more deer than wolves & humans could hunting. The homes we build become homes to millions of beetles and roaches if we forget to clean. Even as we cut down trees and destroy habitat for owls and squirrels we create a place for grasshoppers and locusts to live.

Underground resevoirs of oil, which were once a toxic hazard to moles could pretty soon become home shelter to all sorts of cave animals such as bats(if the tunnels don't cave in) and maybe even new species as they evolve to fit their new environments.

I've read that humans (& many mammals) would actually breathe a lot easier in an atmosphere that has an approx. 13000% higher CO_2 concentration than our current atmosphere, & things like asthma, wheezing, and sleep apnea wouldn't be causing so much trouble any more.

point: everything changes, everything adapts, everything lives on.
I won't say that cutting down some of the chemicals, etc. we use wouldn't be a good thing, (like the freon of the ~80s and gasoline/biofuels today) but even wind is non-renewable if exploited enough. (highly enough efficient system would leave partially stagnant areas behind it, causing all manner of weather problems everywhere.)

[edit]x.x I type too much[/edit]

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I would ignore it. It would be none of my concern. Large pigeons chase sparrows away from breadcrumbs, and I see no need to intervene. It's the same concept. Nature takes care of itself.

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I think that we disagree based on a very important word: harm.

When you say that something is harmed, that means it is altered in a negative way from what it originally was. Pollution is negative to us. Nature is indifferent. Toxic wastes will be diluted with time, or organisms will evolve and adapt to replicate and feed off of the waste. This has been documented in nature. Species may go extinct at any rate, but do not forget that humans are also a species of this planet, and despite our high views of ourselves, our proclamations that we "own" this planet are hollow: Nature is apathetic. Even if we make every other multicellular organism extinct while miraculously staying alive ourselves, nature will eventually restore itself, perhaps long after we are extinct, but it eventually will restore itself.

To say that we are harming nature is absurd. The "damage" we do to nature is purely subjective. We perceive the situation as being negative from our own bias. We have a limited lifespan. Like I said before, All human existence is but a blink of an eye if we just look at the big picture. Seeing smog and pollution your whole life may make you worry, but 100 years is nothing compared to a 4 billion year history. Absolutely nothing.

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Again, Jayshe, what does an energy source mean to you? If humans became extinct, what inherent value does a coal supply or a large underground reserve of oil mean? If nature loses all of its fossil fuel, do you think it devalues nature in some way? Absolutely not. As I said before, nature is indifferent. Energy sources only matter to humans. When we go green, it is selfish. It isn't for nature, it is for *us*.

I heard both you and Aeternus mention the "balance of nature". Nature is always in balance. Always. There is never an instant in time where it is out of balance. Nature is defined by what is, not what we think it is supposed to be. Nature isn't a picturesque meadow with wildflowers and butterflies, nature is the environment, and what the environment does. So long as the laws of physics and chemistry hold the universe together, humans will be unable to affect nature itself.

What we CAN affect, is our own ability to survive under nature's harsh balancing act. Everything we do to pollute the planet is another step towards our own extinction. It is nature's way of balancing itself. Nature by itself is indestructible.

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Exactly. Right on the mark. We cannot say that we are destroying nature just because we THINK we see negative things. We may call it "pollution", but nature just sees it as gas, no different from oxygen or carbon dioxide. We may call it "toxic waste", but nature just sees it as another chemical compound, no different from water or oil. Humans cannot destroy the planet or destroy nature. They can only destroy themselves.