That said, I'm not sure I can muster any indignation that hunters can't hunt as much, or that the first day of hunting season is not "literally a school holiday" anymore.
As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there must be a better way to deal with that than allowing people to shoot them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some bleeding heart when it comes to animals, they aren't all perfect snowflakes of uniqueness, I don't don't see the reason to cause an animal that can feel pain to feel that pain without a good cause. To me, "we've been doing it for generations" is not a good cause.
Edit: I'm still interested in having this discussion, but preferably along one of the established threads sprouting from this, unless the point of view hasn't been covered in a reply. There's as little point in me replying the same thing multiple times as there is in having multiple replies to this stating the same thing, but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things to be said on this topic.
This is a natural, humane view. IMO, it comes from a good place. If I didn't have the knowledge I have, I would also hold this view.
Bonafides: I grew up hunting. I wouldn't say it was subsistence hunting, but it was a substantial portion of our winter protein. I was blissfully ignorant of it at the time, but we were what you would consider poor today. (Pretty much all my friends were poor too.)
I stopped hunting after college when my father did - we both liked nature but we didn't like killing.
Hunting is probably the least terrible way for an animal to die. If you are removed from nature, you may not realize that nature while beautiful, is also horribly, horribly cruel. In winter, the deer starve, get weak and then are run down by predators and killed or freeze to death. If the snow it deep, they may not even have to be weak since they can't run as fast in the deep snow.
I can only think of 2 less cruel ways for population control: extinction (or a localized equivalent) and birth control. The 2nd option might be viable...
I sympathize with your view. The thing is, the alternatives to hunting are all crueler than hunting. The dilemma thus becomes choosing between
(a) humans taking pleasure in killing animals (which should bother anyone IMO)
(b) animals suffering more when nature does its thing
Those are admittedly sucky choices but that is the reality at this point in time at least. The modern "solution" is to hide the reality behind some facade that lets us maintain our a more pleasant mental model of our world and our place in it e.g. I don't torture chickens, I get my eggs from the grocery store.
The question is somewhat ridiculous, there are easily many differences depending on your stance on the importance of sapience, etc, but that doesn't mean there aren't important facets to examining why it's different, and what beliefs hold up or do not under careful examination after deciding what the important differences are.
I thought about it some and I think the difference is that for humans, we have other less horrible choices than animals.
Our choices aren't (a) get eaten by wolves or (b) starve to death (c) get shot by a hunter
At end of life we humans can get palliative care for example. I sympathize with your rebellion if you will, against the cruel choices nature has presented the other denizens of our planet. However, one must consider the reality not what we simply wish the reality was unfortunately.
It may be, but please justify that statement. I think I've outlined in depth my point of view farther down multiple of these responses, and while obviously I don't think I was being ignorant, it's not clear to me that you are responding to an actual point of mine, or whether you are making assumptions as to my reasoning and responding to that.
> The fact is that almost universally hunting is a more ethical form of gathering meat than farming.
What type of farming? Is it more ethical than traditional farming? Who says this discussion is just about gathering meat. There's also the consideration of managing a deer population.
> By far the most committed and caring ecologists that I've meet ... have mostly been hunters/fishermen.
Did I make some argument that hunters were bad people? I don't remember that, and if it was implied, it was accidental.
This topic touches on a few highly charged areas of discussion; hunting, farming, animal population/ecosystem management. People have strong points of view on this, and have an idea of what their opponents already believe. I think I deserve the benefit of a doubt before being labeled with specific beliefs.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have cities and highways everywhere, but we're pretty much past that.
A) Why do you imagine that?
B) Why do you think what you imagine is a fact that's relevant to this discussion?
Our imaginations suck. This is just a fact. We can imagine a dozen impossible things before breakfast, and then fail to imagine a dozen possible things after lunch.
This is why the discipline of science is so important: it forces us to test our imaginings before asserting they are interesting or relevant, at which point they are no longer just imaginings, but evidence.
To the question at hand, hunting is, on the evidence, one of the most efficient, most effective, most humane ways of limiting the population of wild animals. As well as contributing to conservation efforts financially, hunters are a tool used by fish and wildlife departments to limit populations that would otherwise face periodic catastrophic crashes due to disease and starvation. There are other ways this can be done, but they are in general more expensive, less effective, and less humane. It's hard to kill animals like deer, and the fact that there are people willing to pay for the privilege of doing it is a boon to wildlife management.
I'm all for reintroducing more predators, but suburban sprawlers tend to get upset when their pets get eaten regularly.
Of course, at the end of the day you're still ultimately in a "the deer population stabilizes at the point that deer start starving to death" situation, but you can at least lower the deer population to minimize both their impact on the environment and the number of adverse deer-car interactions.
So now instead of excessive amounts of deer, there are excessive amounts of wolves in the region.
..Introduce snakes to curtail wolves now? And than mongoose.
The Mongoose will die off in the winter.
Every animal will feel pain at one point or another.
If an area's deer population is too high to be supported, there will be a lot of pain. Deer will starve to death. Deer will wander out looking for food and be struck by automobiles. Deer will contract CWD and that's really not a good way to die.
I don't think that anyone would claim that a rifle bullet is a "good" way to die but it is a lot less torturous than these others.
So we enter a cost/benefit analysis of the situation, and the cost of "humane" solutions are immense. On the other hand, ethical hunting is a "lesser of two evils" that you've mentioned, but more importantly, it brings money back into the organizations protecting the environment. Many people don't realize the cost of a single hunting tag is very well calculated, regulated, and almost 100% of the profits go into ecosystem preservation and conservation. Closest thing to a win-win scenario we can get at the present, not to mention the act of hunting can be an industry in and of itself generating revenue and business.
Secondly, I'm not sure how we can assume that the old and sickly animals are the ones being killed when humans hunt. I would assume it's a statistically higher percentage of them, but I would also assume it much less statistically relevant than with a bow, and that less than with a spear. On the other end of the spectrum, I would imagine killing deer by dropping a bomb on them would result in no statistical difference in the kills compared to the normal herd make-up. Technology lessens the "we kill the old and sickly" argument.
Feeding them is going to result in an even greater population. Moving them probably isn't viable (they will just do the same thing in the new spot).
And of course, strictly herbivore species are very good at their main business. They fight and win every day against the poison maker's masters: plants and mushroms. If you put an alcaloid in a potato, in most cases even the dumbest deer know 1) What is this thing and what plant produces it. 2) that this is not safe to eat just smelling it at 5 miles of distance.
Any ideas? I imagine the main causes of death for deer are predation (by humans, or other animals depending on location), and getting hit by cars. I imagine the latter is at least as painful as the former on average, and the latter also kills and injures a lot of humans.
Coyotes do adapt but they aren't generally capable of taking down deer. But humans with guns are. As a hunter myself, shooting deer is a quick for the deer and good for the hunter in various ways, not all of which have to do with eating.
Are you suggesting that non-human predators cause less pain to deer than human hunters with guns? I highly doubt that is the case.
The ecosystem you speak of was destroyed when the apex predators were removed generations ago . Re-introducing predators does two things (look it up):
1) Disperses the herds thereby extending their range, and 2) causes some serious (unmanageable) peaks and valleys in populations of prey (rabbits, deer, moose, etc...) until equilibrium is reached (if ever)
Apex predator birth rate is low and it would take years to have a noticeable effect. Of course, releasing enough predators to "thin the herd", so to speak, requires an unsustainable predator population once the thinning is complete. So you get mange, starvation, fido goes missing, etc...
Hunters on the other hand only get as many deer tags as needed to control the populations. With that said, I agree that predators should be brought back in limited numbers and allowed reach natural sustainable levels within the ecosystem. But to use them as a short term way of controlling deer density is silly. You don't fix a complex, interconnected system build over decades with a band-aid.
Thus the vegetation can cope with loses as ever did and not just dies.
> causes some serious (unmanageable) peaks and valleys in populations of prey
Peaks and valleys are caused by diseases and famines, wolves are the worst enemy for livestock and wild deer diseases, so the final result is deer populations more stable and health in fact.
People, specially children, would be also much more safe with wolves than without them, because... first of all, less car accidents with deer, second: less americans killed or having pain by Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Tularemia, Ehrlichiosis, Relapsing fever, Colorado tick fever or Babesiosis. All tickborne diseases, spread by deer or small carnivores, that are a much bigger threat for children playing outdoors because ticks are everywhere in deerland.
> Apex predator birth rate is low and it would take years to have a noticeable effect
Not necessarily, because the "ecology of fear" change the behaviour of preys. You don't need to wipe out all deer at all. In Yellowstone wolves changed all for better in just five or six years if I'm not wrong.
In truth, this is all fairly removed from my original statement and intent, which was that if some hunters are no longer allowed to hunt an area and feel disgruntled, I have little sympathy.
Once a rural area with an overabundance of deer becomes re-zoned as a "residential area" the hunters often can't hunt at all, and a heavily overpopulated species becomes effectively a protected species in that area.
You had a situation where generations of people kept things in balance. Farmers got rid of the wolves, hunters naturally managed the herd of deer. Many people relied on venison as a staple food. Then people show up who are afraid of hunters/guns/noise/etc and do dumb things like feed the wildlife and call the cops when they become a nuisance.
That's not to say someone won't come up with a justification that I'll fully accept. I didn't say "oh, hunting is horrible, how could a person ever do that!", I said I didn't have much sympathy, and that's because I don't agree with the justifications I've heard to this point.
My personal point of view is that wildlife are both a natural resource and living animals., As a natural resource, the usage should come with some sort of associated cost, to account for the damage it's usage and/or removal causes to the environment (e.g. burning coal has negative externalities that are poorly accounted for to this point). As living animals that feel pain, I think there should be a reason to cause that pain, and or kill them. It needs to be justifiable, but for me the bar is not impossibly high. "I needed the food to survive" is fully capable as a justification in my eyes, while "It's fun" is not. obviously there's a fuzzy space in the middle, which I'm not sure the details of.
In the deer example, as noted in the article, overpopulation strips forests down. Saplings get chewed down by starving deer, bark gets stripped from others, etc. The elimination of forage impacts other wildlife. By being "nice" to Bambi, you'll have a dead forest in 30-40 years, assuming a condo complex isn't dropped down from the sky.
Apart from extinction, I don't care how the deer population as a whole is managed. Individually, I would prefer to cause the least amount of pain to an animal as possible for the needed outcome, where that outcome is dictated by the needs of society and the individual (and in this specific case, I don't consider entertainment a need). I'm fully accepting of, and vastly prefer. the idea of animals raising in traditional farm settings when we need to cull them, and if they need to be killed, doing so in a quick and humane manner.
I am not disputing that deer need to be managed. If the only way we can seem to do that is through hunting, then okay, I consider it justified. I think effort should also be put into finding alternatives to managing the population. We need this in many other cases as well, where hunting isn't feasible. The salient point for me is that the hunting fulfills a need for society and the ecosystem, and if that need subsides, so should the hunting.
A large bullet through the heart and lungs is probably not going to be much worse than slaughtering livestock. (This is also why states set minimum caliber for hunting deer -- too small increases the risk of the deer dying too slowly.)
The salient point for me is that the hunting fulfills a need for society and the ecosystem, and if that need subsides, so should the hunting.
This is already the way of things. The number of licenses issued for a given year is the DNR's response to the current state of the deer population.
If you truly care about the ethics of the situation, hunting should be vastly preferred as a means of obtaining food over the current status quo of factory farming. A quick death by bullet is far, far better than a life of squalor and misery followed by, far more frequently than we'd like to realize, an agonizing and slow death.
Is it impossible to look for other paths? I don't believe the discussion should be reduced to the two extremes of "shoot them with guns" or "factory farm them". Our current and past situations need not be the only choices when facing the future.
You seem to want to live in a world where animals live peaceful lives and die gently in their sleep. We do not live in such a world. Right now, the alternative to shooting them is to have them violently eaten by predators or drawn-out death by poison. If we do nothing to control their populations, those that survive will eventually age to the point where most will become infirm enough to die slowly by starvation. Unless you propose to sent vets into the woods armed with tranquilizers and materials for lethal injection, a bullet is virtually certain to be the least terrible way for a deer to die.
I said, I didn't have a lot of sympathy for hunters not being able to hunt. Then I clarified, I thought killing of animals should be justified, and gave specific examples of where I thought it was, and was not, justified. For the record, ecosystem management (population control), in the absence of better options, is a good justification for hunting in my eyes.
If the the animal population doesn't need management, do I think enjoyment of hunting or tradition justifies it? No.
> You seem to want to live in a world where animals live peaceful lives and die gently in their sleep.
That, there, is a straw man argument being set up. I haven't said this, and I believe my other responses around this topic have made that abundantly clear. Please don't put words in my mouth.
> Right now, the alternative to shooting them is to have them violently eaten by predators
Yep. So what? There's a reason for that. The life of the predator and the ecosystem as a whole works because of this process. I'm just not sure what I'm expected to believe hunting, for hunting's sake, is supposed to contribute.
Ideally though, I would like vat grown meat. To many, that sounds disgusting. To me, it sounds like a reproducible process that can eventually be perfected to give very specific types of meat as needed. Perfect steaks every time. It solves a lot of other problems at the same time, so bonus.
I'm aware that the previous, and my stance on hunting, is all very pie-in-the-sky. I still think it's a worthwhile discussion.
(In the sense that a controlled deer population results in greater diversity of plant species over the long term. Of course the relative value of plant species and deer are subjective)
There is very little young cedar, directly as a result of deer. If you drive along US 2 in the UP of Michigan, you can see that all the trees along the road look like they are trimmed. It is from deer browse, they eat everything they can reach.
That's why I pointed out that it is better for plants to have less deer. It's subjective, but it's possible to believe that shooting a deer is a direct, net benefit to the environment, rather than a cost.
I think you may be romanticizing things a bit. How many generations are you using for a sample-size, and how do you know things were any more "in-balance" as opposed to just a different equally-artificial arrangement?
I'll grant you "nobody complained of too-many deer around their house", but that's a far cry from some sort of "we were one with the land and lived in harmony with all the cycles of nature".
Why not?