Ok fine, then you agree with me that it's ridiculous to suggest that all species of critter need to have descendants for all time immemorial. If that's the case we have no argument.
I merely offered the question as a matter of personal choice.
Good, I agree it should be a matter of personal choice (and that the government should stay out of it). If you owned a piece of land and wanted to try to protect some critter on it, I certainly wouldn't stop you.
I'm assuming you would fill in the pond given the opportunity.
Well it depends, on (1) how badly I want/need the thing I'm "filling in the pond" for, (2) whether the critter in question is particularly cute or special to me, and (3) how "endangered" I think the critter really is (no, I would not take the government employee's word for it). If the choice were up to me then I'd weigh many factors and make the choice I find most appealing. Heck maybe I want to keep the pond and its critters around to show to visitors, who knows?
But I definitely would resent the government robbing me of that choice altogether. As someone said earlier, it's my property.
All your fancy footwork says to me that you would still be conflicted knowing that you, and you alone, had made the decision to speed the extinction of even one of God's creatures.
Sorry to yet again be such a nit-picker, but a "creature" does not go extinct. Creatures die. It is species of creatures - or genetic lines of same - which go extinct.
You probably think this is a minor point but IMHO debates like this are always poisoned by the so-called "environmental" side's slippery use of language. The strategy is to make emotional appeals, and to do so "environmentalists" like to pretend that this is a debate between whether something should be "killed" or "saved". It's not. All these creatures we are talking about will die no matter what we do. The only question is whether they or their relatives will always have descendants.
When viewed that way it's not so obvious why Always Having Descendants is such an important thing, as you've demonstrated by your backtracking. But if you can pretend that I want to "speed the extinction" of "one of God's creatures" (which is IMPOSSIBLE - each of God's creatures is GOING TO DIE, whether I do anything or not!) you can make my position sound more sinister.
The real issue is whether there is some kind of moral obligation to take special measures to ensure that every species of creature - no, not whether it "lives" or "dies" (it WILL DIE) - but whether it passes along its genetic information to descendants.
I simply don't think it's so obvious that such special measures always need to be taken, let alone enforced by the government. Further, people who do think this is obvious end up relying on arguments which are essentially religious in nature. You start straddling the line yourself with this "God's creatures" stuff.
I thought there was supposed to be a "separation of church and state", so why is the government allowed to tell me I must sacrifice some of my property to save the descendents of one of God's creatures?
(So-called "environmentalists" really don't like hearing that last paragraph, however; they don't like being reminded that theirs is a religion, let alone that they are trying to impose it on me....)