[evoke4908]

Counterpoint: being useful to a more successful species is a staggeringly effective evolutionary strategy. Nature is chock full of symbiotic relationships and it's a perfectly valid ecological niche. Symbionts exist whether or not the host is capable of feeling bad about it.

By becoming attached to such a successful species as humans, any symbiont species has an extremely good chance of surviving for as long as the host species. Including long after they'd have gone extinct naturally.

Most species that humans like or find useful will eventually end up colonizing entire star systems along with us. Those species will continue to live on in their evolutionary descendants long after the sun exapnds and earth becomes inhospitable.

Personally I call that a successful species.

Or we could just leave the worms alone and let them be hunted to extinction by predators or die out in natural climate or ecological shifts over time. I guess that's nicer than species continuity into galactic time scales.

[aziaziazi]

Very interesting take. However there’s some important difference between the species that express this behavior in the wild, free world (think pilot fish) and those that are breed, used, breed again then killed -all while in forced captivity.

I doubt the livestock would define itself as a "successful” if it could use language.