A couple of years ago we heard news that 50% of all vertebrate species had disappeared in 40 years. On Thursday, we were greeted with news that by 2020 the figure is likely to rise to 66% of all vertebrates. It is no wonder that the conservationists are shouting. It is no wonder that they are so desperate to get their message heard. Animals, it seems, are on the way out. And no one appears to much care.

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So, allow me to entertain the idea of a post-animal Britain. Could we make the best of this world, in true Theresa May fashion? Are animals, perhaps, all a bit overrated? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad?

Sure, there would be some tough choices at first. One particularly pressing matter would be finding a way to cross-pollinate flowering crops. As is well known, trees and insects co-evolved, the plants offering a sugary reward to insects in return for their pollination services. How might we achieve this without bees and flies? Simple. The problem of cross-fertilisation could quite simply be solved by robots or people on day release from jail (or even children who don’t get into grammar schools). They could be made to hand-fertilise flowers. They could be like little unthinking bees.

Indeed, hand-fertilisation is already common practice in some parts of the world, where invertebrate populations have already been ravaged. Think of the savings of such a plan! Robots don’t need sugary water produced by plants, after all. They run on cheap oil and gas, which there’s plenty of, forever. Without invertebrates, everyone wins, right?

More seriously, there could be other benefits. Think of climate change. Global emissions of CO 2 would be greatly reduced without them, seeing that the gas that sprouts forth from farm animals accounts for 15% of human-caused global CO 2 emissions. So that would be good. We won’t even miss the farm animals either, since it seems increasingly likely that we will be 3D printing our dinners in the future. Indeed, lab-grown meat is already becoming a very real prospect, which means that sheep and pigs and chickens, all very costly to run, could disappear quite happily.

And pets, too. Pets can go. They contribute to global emissions as well. If we were to get rid of them, within two generations the very notion of having a pet would probably end up being absurd. The very idea that some houses had cats that would warm a person’s lap while they watched Netflix could seem almost perverted to our great-great-grandchildren whose idea of having a meaningful relationship with an animal would, by then, involve tossing 35 Pokéballs at an imaginary one while sitting on the toilet.

It’s not all rosy, however. I’m the first to admit that there would be problems in a post-animal world. Sure, green algal blooms would cover the entire face of the planet – most of the land and sea – and all plants would remain uncropped and there would be the stench of scavenging fungus which would come to fill the niche left by Earth’s animal decomposers. But we can handle a bit of a whiff or maybe get a man in to fix this for us or something. Oh, and the crops wouldn’t grow because there would be no worms to oxygenate the soil. And the soil communities – tiny nematode worms and mites – would die so the soil would essentially be dead and likely to blow away, being completely unsuitable for any forms of crops. But … let’s not get bogged down in the details, OK? Again, children and robots can probably fill this role. It’ll be fine.

For there is another bonus to living in a world without animals. It is simple. Imagine the ego-boost that would come from being the only animals to survive a mass extinction event. Imagine being the pinch point. You and me. We could be the masters of a mass extinction so enormous that all future life on Earth might be a descendent of us. Imagine, in 50m years, little rat humans and little pig humans and little humans that feast upon wetland grasses poisoned by a film of toxic bacteria. Imagine little fungus-eating humans, gorging upon the silent forests of stinking colourless mushrooms that thrive on rotting, uneaten trees. Imagine little cat humans that can warm your lap while watching Netflix. That sounds great, doesn’t it? We could be surrounded by animals shaped in our own image. We could be gods, essentially.

It may sound surreal, but conservationists, I believe, imagine this world quite a bit. They consider this human world, and what it would be like without animals in it. A silent world where it’s all about us and what industry can do – where there’s no escape from humanity. A world where the only sounds are human-made and the only colours are factory-made is not an Earthly place, to me at least.

So perhaps it’s time, finally, that we started considering the worst if only for a few moments every now and then. Perhaps it will make us listen that bit harder the next time statistics like these are published by conservationists. Because this is a real decline. This is a real trend. This is what mass extinctions look like from the inside. An animal world becoming less animal by the day. So, which world do you like best: ours or theirs?