Donate blood, but not to mosquitoes

Instead of killing mosquitoes, people should let them take "blood donations" because they need to fertilize eggs－That's what French animal-rights activist Aymeric Caron advises people to do. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang comments:

It is admirable that the animal-rights activist has so much love and sympathy for mosquitoes as a species. We hope he extends a little to his own species, too, which is a victim of mosquitoes.

According to statistics of US website Science Alert, mosquitoes cause the deaths of more than 750,000 humans every year. In comparison, sharks are responsible for six human fatalities a year, while wolves kill 10.

Of course, it is not mosquitoes that are the actual killers, but the diseases such as the Zika virus, yellow fever and encephalitis B that they carry. During construction of the Panama Canal, so many workers were killed by yellow fever that the construction work had to be suspended for months, until doctors killed the majority of the mosquitoes.

In the past, the list of mosquito-carried epidemics also included malaria, which took millions of human lives every year until quinine and artemisinin were discovered.

Some people worry that if mosquitoes die out, the whole ecological chain might be affected. But that worry is far from necessary because mosquitoes are far from dying out. It is cold temperature and lack of water ponds that threaten their survival. Human self-defense claps kill very few of them.

Mosquitoes have very strong survival ability, even if the number of individuals becomes very small, they can quickly breed and can easily re-form into big groups. It is temperature and water that affect their survival most. Unless all the standing water on the planet vanishes or becomes heavily polluted, or the Earth enters another glacial age, there is little possibility of mosquitoes dying out.

If that day comes, mosquitoes will not be the only species that faces extinction. Human kind will have to worry about its own survival, instead of caring about a species that sucks its blood and claims lives.

It is good to promote love for animals and protection of their rights, but totally unnecessary to deprive humans of the right to self-defense when being attacked by mosquitoes. Just kill them, for your own health and that of others.