Humans and I'm not joking maybe Neanderthals would have coexisted with the planet better and we would not be going through the 6th Anthropocene mass extinction event.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Why wish? It happens every day.
these flying stinging insects ... what are they called ... that can give you bad diseases (e.g. malaria)
Emus. Stupid flightless birds.
And finally be rid of those stupid Liberty Mutual ads? You might be on to something.
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Fleas.
They make great music though
they make great merchants too
Do you even know what a buzzard actually is though? Go look up a photo of a buzzard and make sure you aren't mistaking buzzards with vultures.
Both are vital parts of theor ecosystems though, I'd hate to see either vanish.
My pick might very well be humans for how fucked up we are and how much we destroy and cause suffering for all the other animals
You know you're right humans might be best
You always have the choice to not exist, you can be the good human who removes themselves from the equation (not actually telling you to die, your logic is just fried) Any concept of good that you know of came from other humans, your thoughts aren't that original, not how we work. Humans are the only species preserving other species and not driving them to extinction.
Chicken!
Just to see how everyone would react.
Any of the scary parasites, like the guinea worm or those amoebas that eat your brain and kill you within a week.
Giraffes
The Orange Crybaby.
Cattle. That would cut down human land use by a lot (in the short term, probably not very effective in the long term)
"One animal" could easily mean an individual animal. This makes things tricky. Ruling out humans (because that's no fun), how can a single animal's disappearance affect anything?
Well, I don't think it can. The biggest effects would happen if you remove an individual from a critically endangered species, but I don't see anything good coming from that. For just about all other species, it would be like a drop in the ocean.
So, given that I probably can't make the world meaningfully better, I'll aim smaller. I'll remove a dog that shits in the street without its owner picking it up, causing innocent people to step in it.
Mathematically, assuming perfect knowledge about the future (if we can remove an animal, we might as well see the future):
Define S_0 = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming no dog has been removed.
Given dog d, define S(d) = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming dog d is removed right now.
Select d_1 = argmin{S(d}}. (If there's a tie, just pick one arbitrarily or use a tie-breaking metric)
If S(d_1) < S_0, then remove d_1.
If S(d_1) = S_0, then there is no improvement over baseline - maybe whichever dog I could remove just gets replaced with another dog. In this case, I could still remove d_1 if the tie-breaking metric did find an improvement, otherwise see next case.
If S(d_1) > S_0, then no matter what dog I try to remove, somehow I end up stepping on more piles of shit in my life?! Ugh. Remove the nearest ant or something.
Myself.
Can you do it in a very public way that gets a lot of attention? Would make for an interesting news cycle. Or if you happen to be a magician, it could make you legendary!
Joking aside
if you are depressed, or have thoughts of suicide, you are not alone. Help is available.
The amnesia sloth-newt. That tricky fucker got me yesterday... I can't remember what it was but it was important and by the time I got out of the shower... Poof! It was gone with the memory.
Think someone asked this before and the overwhelming evidence based answer was Sloths and/or Koalas because they have gross eating habits and sexual habits