We have been playing god with animals since the emergence of husbandry. Lapdogs are designed for the city, urban lifestyles and singles. Only the technology is changing, and maybe the scope?

Yes ! Let's give umbrellas and tan solar creams to polar bears !

If we would just stop eating animals, we could return half the farmland to wilderness, taking a lot of pressure off the climate as well. Vegans need less health care but live longer. We need to tinker with our warlike tendencies too. Fighting for oil is planetary suicide, forced on us by those who only love money.

Bob Stuart - Most farmland is focused on growing food, some of which is grown for farm animal production. With more billions of people on the Earth you are less likely to see less farmland but more. If you want to affect farmland, stop growing "fuel".

This article is a common tactic for enviro group fund raising efforts. Get a prediction of disaster into the media that is alarming, scary, and coming soon. But predicting 2/3 of wildlife will be gone by 2020 is just comical and could only be believed by brain washed enviro-nuts.

Playing God is an awful idea. Breeding dogs to suit a purpose isn't quite the same. It still allows God or nature to determine if a particular combination will work. This is not on the same level as modern genetic engineering. Sort of like comparing a kid's chemistry set to nuclear physics.
In response to an easier comment, the middle class isn't so much fleeing from the cities as being driven. I lived in a mid-sized east coast city for 10 years, finally leaving due to obscene property taxes and unbridled crime. The least financially able cope by means of subsidies, pay few taxes, and have learned to tolerate the crime. The wealthy simply build a fortress and pay the taxes. Were the cities less inhospitable, more would be willing to return.

It's not even worth conjecture until we agree on a way to ease the population pressure on the planet. Do that, and it truly is an end-run around these problems. One child per urban couple, 3 children for rural couples.

Gee, I thought was the purpose of Evolution?

By not eating animals or by tinkering with our war tendencies etc, etc, we will only make more room for the expansion of human numbers, clearly already beyond sustainable levels. If humanity wishes to coexist with other species then we have to control our own breading. Our numbers will eventually be controlled through external forces (probably very messy) but the ideal would be to become proactive....... a true demonstration of intelligence ?? Or are 'means of mass destruction' our pinnacle of of intellectual achievement ?

Having to buy a house and send kids to college has forced population control on the west.