Would human extinction be a tragedy?

Without humans, many other animals would go extinct

Question: Would human extinction be a tragedy?
Position‹2 of 4›: Yes, human extinction would be a tragedy
Argument‹2 of 3›: Without humans, many other animals would go extinct

The extinction of the human race would cause other extinctions, making it a tragedy.

The argument

The argument rests on a claim about dependency: the disappearance of humans would not leave the rest of nature as it was, because parts of it now persist only through human activity. The clearest cases are agricultural. There are various cereal crops that require human assistance in their reproduction — plants that no longer propagate without cultivation, and which therefore have no route to continuing once nobody is sowing them. Alongside these there are genetic bottlenecks present in some species of plant life that make them susceptible to disease, a vulnerability currently managed by the people who breed and tend them, and which would simply go unmanaged if those people were gone. The same dependency holds for animals, and the record supplies two kinds of example. There are a whole host of animal species that human intervention prevented the extinction of: the Panamanian golden frog was almost wiped out by disease and survives through the intervention that followed. And many domestic animals only exist today because of their usefulness to humans — bred into forms that suit human purposes, kept in numbers that human demand sustains, and in many cases no longer equipped for life outside that arrangement. Neither group would be here today without humans, and neither would last long without them. The conclusion follows from adding that loss to the one already under consideration: our extinction would mean the extinction of all of these animals too. Whatever is said about the loss of humanity taken on its own, the event would not be confined to a single species. It would carry off the crops, the plants and the animals whose continued existence is now contingent on ours, and it is that compounded loss which would make the incident a tragedy.

Context

There are many species that, without human interference, would be extinct today. Humans are not just a scourge for many life-forms, we are also the saviours.

Premises

[P1]Many plant and animal species survive today only because of human intervention, such as crop cultivation and conservation programs. [P2] If humans went extinct, these dependent species would also go extinct. [P3] The extinction of these additional species compounds the loss caused by human extinction. [C] Therefore, human extinction would be a tragedy.

Counter-arguments

In the last 500 years alone, humans have been responsible for the extinction of 322 birds, mammals and reptiles. The human preservation of a handful of animals and plants does not nearly equate to these lost species. Humans are a net negative impact on the world. Therefore, their extinction would not be a tragedy.

Rejecting the premises

P3: The number of species we save is nowhere near the number of species we have killed off. So, in the grand scheme of things, it would not be a tragedy.