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Comment by phyrex | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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