Wildlife Habitats
Essay

Commended Entry: "Wildlife Habitats: Challenges and Achievements" by Lorenzo Pelagatti from Italy

This article was submitted in the Kids World Travel Guide Essay Competition 2023 in the Senior Category 12 - 15 years.

Wildlife Habitats: Challenges and Achievements

Hi! My name is Lorenzo and I’m 12 years old. I live in a small town in the North of Italy, called Tradate, in the province of Varese. Today I’m going to talk about wildlife, about the habitat of animals and about what we can do to save animals.

Wildlife…what’s the meaning of "wildlife"? Wildlife includes all the animal species who live in a wild area without human contact, for example a panda, a lion or a tiger. And what is a habitat? In simple terms, a habitat is the natural home of a plant or an animal, for example a forest, or a cave, or a lake or a whole mountain.

Unfortunately, some of the animals in our world are threatened, endangered or even worse at risk of extinction. There are many reasons for this: hunting, pollution, climate change and the destruction of the natural habitats, because of the building-up of new cities, streets, and towers. As you can see, our society is always responsible and human beings are guilty for this.

What are we doing to threaten natural forms of life? We are forcing them to live differently compared with the past, to leave their home, to eat different things. In some cases, we hunt some animal species because of money; just think about elephants, for example, we hunt them for the ivory contained in their tusks. The result is that elephants in areas like Africa or Asia are at risk of extinction. Sometimes I wonder what those animals would tell us if they could speak. I think they would ask us to stop our behaviours. We have lived together in peace for many many years, but now we are like evil and we are treating them badly, leaning to the risk of extinction for many of them. Among the wonderful habitats of our planet, I am very fascinated by the savannah, for example, because it’s beautiful and all the animals who live there are really amazing!

One of the animal species at risk of extinction that interests me a lot is the white lion. I think it’s fantastic and its history it’s really interesting. White lions were discovered for the first time in 1938. Approximately, there are only 100 white lions in the whole world. Most of them are in zoos or in circuses, and only few individuals are free, nevertheless they’re hunted. We need to change our behaviour!

How can we help them? We must not destroy their natural habitats, we need to stop the hunting and we need to stop even the pollution. Only in this way, the world will be better than before and all of us will live better.

Congratulations on your essay about Wildlife habitats: Challenges and Achievements, Lorenzo. Lovely work!

Lorenzo Pelagatti attends Scuola Media Paolo VI in Rho/ Italy. English as Second Language. Home Language is Italian.