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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

"as the government set out a suite of animal welfare measures including... banning the import of hunting trophies."

This part is surprising to me. Hunting is actually really important in a lot of areas. Deer hunting is really big where I live. It controls the deer population here, where they would become massively overpopulated without intervention. It brings in tons of revenue for our state's conservation department, providing money that is then used to restore the environment, bring back expatriated animals, and enforce wildlife laws. Hunting is similarly important in some places in Africa, providing them an incentive to maintain their local wildlife population.

Seems like an odd part of the law to pass when considering this.

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It irks me that there are no links to the laws or even the actual name to look them up, but banning trophy import doesn't seem like banning hunting itself. That seemed like they're trying to subvert international trade for Rhino horns and Elephant tusks and stuff. I'm sure you can still hunt the local deer just as long as the reason isn't to export antlers to the UK for profit. International antler trade presumably only becomes profitable if deer are so rare as to be endangered, not when they're common enough that slowing the population growth is a net good. So this seems like an attempt to disincentivize the already illegal poaching of endangered species, not to prevent Africans from doing any kind of hunting at all.

Hunting is much more than about population control, I mentioned that in my comment when I said "Hunting is similarly important in some places in Africa, providing them an incentive to maintain their local wildlife population."

In poor regions of the world, incentive alignment is important for species conservation and survival. The people are often barely surviving. If there is no incentive to keep endangered species alive and thriving, then they will be killed for bushmeat. Legal, controlled hunting that brings revenue to an area will help such species survive.

> It irks me that there are no links to the laws or even the actual name to look them up

This is because it's the Queen's Speech: it's what the government of the day intends to pursue as legislation for that session. It's essentially advertising what the government's priorities are (and just as importantly, what they are not). Sessions usually last about a year and not everything in the speech always makes it through to legislation.

At this point, the legislation hasn't been drafted let alone gone through any readings in either chamber.

Hunters specifically feed deer throughout the winter and then shoot them later on (my grandfather was very much into hunting). The whole “overpopulation” thing is a bad faith argument and doesn’t make logical sense either; there’s no way a native species wouldn’t find a healthy balance if left alone

We first exterminated the wolf, and mountain lion, and suppressed coyotes. Deer (like rabbits) are machines to turn browse into more deer. The balance point is 100% deer and then collapse of the foliage.

When we kill all the predators, deer will eat everything and then starve. You can hunt them or reintroduce their predators.

Not just starve. Overpopulation also drastically increases the frequency of disease in a population, they get much sicker. Plus with deer, an increased population increases road deaths from deer crossing.

How do you feel about invasive species[1] I.e. non-native? Is it okay to regulate their populations?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species

Where are you from? Nobody does that in Iowa and we have lot's of problems with deer population.

Here in Missouri, many people with private land plant alfalfa plots and use deer feeders and mineral blocks to help the deer grow big and healthy, with big racks that make for good trophies.

The thing is that even with areas where feeding like this doesn't occur like the Mark Twain National Forest, overpopulation is still an issue, so their claim that feeding causes issues is inaccurate, or at least incomplete and more nuanced. It just improves their quality of life and health until they're hunted. Technically it could increase the carrying capacity of the species, but because the population is managed, it's not really an issue.

> there’s no way a native species wouldn’t find a healthy balance if left alone

I guess it defines what you mean as “native” as it takes a while for species to hit equilibrium and survive. But environmental effects change that balance as well as humans.

So it seems tautologically that any species in balance is “native.”

In reality, species can easily overpopulate and go extinct or extinct others. See stuff like the North American camel that died out.

Or the gray wolf population in the US West that is growing quite too high, despite being “native.”

In my region, deer are very plentiful in suburban areas because humans crowded out their natural predators. They are native but are overpopulated. Hunting helps reduce their population. If you remove hunting then you must deal with their overpopulation some other way.

In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The Coast Guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer. Subsequently, the reindeer population rose to about 6,000 by 1963 and then died off in the next two years to 42 animals. A scientific study attributed the population crash to the limited food supply in interaction with climatic factors (the winter of 1963–64 was exceptionally severe in the region). By the 1980s, the reindeer population had completely died out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island#Mammals

Hunting isn't essential because there are many other ways for people to feed themselves that don't require killing animals with guns or bows and arrows. It's a cultural practice like eating cats or dogs.

I hunt small game a lot, always for food. I dont feel very taken by the fact that importing trophies is going to be off the table. Hunting is one thing and glofiyng killing is perhaps another completely different one.

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