Feeding animals, particularly young animals, creates a wide range of issues that cause problems for the animals and the environment. First, young animals are like people: if you reward them for doing the wrong thing, they will keep doing the wrong thing. Young animals have to learn how to find food for themselves in order to survive without being looked after when they leave their parent's territories. When humans feed these young animals, they learn to expect food from humans. This artificial food source causes animals to expect food from humans and they do not learn to forage for themselves. This can causes many animals to starve, especially when they grow up and are forced out of their parent's territories – which would be the park areas where humans go. All of which is not good for the animals in the long run (although scavengers might be happy).

This issue of animals learning to expect food from humans into the second side affect; the loss of fear. Animals are suppose to be instinctively wary of other creatures, like humans, for survival purposes. When they loss that fear, several problematic events can happen. Primarily, animals that are too friendly with people or act oddly around people are often assumed to be rabid or aggressive and often end up being put down because of that. If to many of a certain type of animal is killed, especially higher in the food chain, the balance of the ecosystem is destroyed. Also animals that are not afraid to approach humans are more easy injured or abused by people who do not respect nature. Ironically, being hurt by a human brings back the fear, which helps in the long run.

A third and less thought of side affect of humans feeding animals is that human food is just that: for humans. Animals require different set of nutrients, and a constant diet of human food will cause them to develop health problems, especially in younger animals, and eventually die.

But why do we, as humans, care if animals die? Simply put, if we like having parks with healthy plants and animals to enjoy, we need to keep all the creatures in the environment healthy. An ecosystem is a complex web of relationships, many of which we do not realize until we remove part of the web, and something that was not at all related to the removed thing begins to die. On a more serious note, we humans depend on the world-wide ecosystem for so much of our resources, that caring for the local parks makes for great practice in the long run. There is also the moral question of our duty to care for the natural world, so that we can coexist with it and leave it behind so future generations to enjoy. And sometimes the best way to care for something is to leave it to its own devices. In this case, letting animals be animals: feel free to watch from a distance, but interference has far-reaching negative repercussions.