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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

My apathy stems from the act of hunting a live animal. While I understand hunting for food for survival, hunting for sport or hunting for food when it's not essential doesn't sit well with me.

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.

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"As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there must be a better way to deal with that than allowing people to shoot them. "

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...

For me, the desire to not cause pain is offset by the needs of the ecosystem and humanity. We may need to manage certain animal populations through killing members of that population, and allowing hunting may be the most humane way to accomplish that, at least with our current understanding and capabilities. If someone enjoys hunting, and it serves a cause, such as population control, which we don't have a better method for enacting? I'm fine with that. It's suffering, but it's justified. If that needs subsides, but people still want to hunt because they enjoy it, or it's something they were raised doing and they want to continue? I'm not very sympathetic in that case.

I can see where you are coming from I think - hunting for pleasure when there are other alternatives is something you aren't sympathetic to.

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.

A lot of people are putting forth (b), but without a lot of justification other than disease, predation, old age. What I'm interested in at this point is how is that different than applying to towards people. What's wrong with "people die of alzheimer's, car crashes, old age, etc. and these are arguably worse than just allowing some people that enjoy killing other people from saving them from that burden."

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.

This is a worthwhile thought exercise. I'm not sure why people are down-voting you.

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's surprising, given that you understand all that, that you object to hunting for food when that food is not strictly necessary. Even if you are not a subsistence hunter, it can still be good. The hunter can enjoy hunting, the department of fish & game can use the hunter to manage populations, the burden on industrial agriculture & farming is reduced...

Strictly speaking, I don't. I think there are better choices than factory farming, and better choices than hunting, but they may not be ready or sustainable currently. If it was purely a choice between cattle, pigs and chicken raised in horrible conditions and hunting, then I would prefer people hunt. But it's not as simple as that, and there are other options on an individual level. They may not be appealing (to me either), but that doesn't mean I think people should be able to ignore the consequences of their actions. This may be a case where the actions are ethically troubling but helpful for society. The problem arises when it becomes less helpful to society, but people feel entitles to continue their prior actions. I think forcing people to confront the ethical portion the entire time helps prevent this, to a degree.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it's horribly ignorant, I'm sorry I mean no offense by that. It's just that if you are unfamiliar with farming and hunting it might be easy to draw those kind of conclusions. The fact is that almost universally hunting is a more ethical form of gathering meat than farming. There are certainly unethical hunters but far FAR more care deeply about the animals and there well being. By far the most committed and caring ecologists that I've meet, I've volunteered for over 10 years for various ecological causes, have mostly been hunters/fishermen.

> he problem with this viewpoint is that it's horribly ignorant

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.

In most places, hunting season tends to be used as local animal population control. If you don't hunt the animals for meat, they are liable to become roadkill. It becomes a danger to people to have animal populations grow unrestricted.

Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have cities and highways everywhere, but we're pretty much past that.

Which doesn't really effect my feelings towards those who are upset they can't hunt a location they were previously able to. If the hunting is beneficial and there's not a better solution, the ability to hunt there may return. If it's about people's feeling of entitlement, them my original assessment stands.

You know, I have never heard someone use the word 'entitlement' in a meaningful and productive manner. It is pointlessly dismissive.

> As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there must be a better way to deal with that than allowing people to shoot them.

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.

Your plausible options are rifles, predators, and poisons.

I'm all for reintroducing more predators, but suburban sprawlers tend to get upset when their pets get eaten regularly.

One of the DEC guys I talked to was a big proponent of more fences. When you put up deer fences around fields, you don't just protect the crops inside, you also restrict the deer's movement and access to food.

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.

Yep. A buddy of mine growing up had large numbers of feral dogs and cats running around. Solution: Dishes of antifreeze everywhere. There were too many to shoot, but antifreeze was cheap and effective. He said he had trouble sleeping because the dying animals screamed so much.

Reintroducing predators seems to be the only alternative to population control by rifle. But being maimed by wolves is probably not a more peaceful death than being shot.

More peaceful, no. But that supports and ecosystem, which has other benefits, and the wolf that kills the deer uses the deer to survive, so while the deer dies, the wold lives. I find that justifiable.

Ok so to curtail an excessive deer population, humans force some wolves into the region.

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.

There is not such as excessive amount of a top predator, top predators avoid this being territorial and having less cubs.

Pain is a part of life.

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.

This is a key argument here. In a hypothetical, perfectly moral ecosystem, could we find some way of "birth control" to limit the population AND the pain? Perhaps, the population of deer is staggeringly immense, and the financial compensation and minimal fiscal benefit behind such a plan seems like a potential path of waste and failure behind whomever enacts the program.

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.

Would it help if someone pointed out that wild animals will eventually die in pain whether hunters shoot them or not? There are no vets in the wild to give them morphine to put them down when they get too old to survive. They will either get sick, starve, or get eaten.

Firstly, that's a rather odd argument. I wouldn't assume I could kill some old or sickly person in some remote region of the world where there were no doctors. Why does the same logic not apply to an animal? It may not apply, but at least make the case, rather than leaving it an assumption.

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.

I think the viable alternatives are pretty much poison or more predators.

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).

Poison to ecology is like trepanation to modern medicine. Not so useful as expected, and only as a last resort for very special cases when you don't mind to nuke the entire community. Useful wipping all rats and cats from islands for instance. The worst weapon available in most other cases.

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.

> As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there must be a better way to deal with that than allowing people to shoot them.

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.

Well, the problem is that we messed up the ecosystem by removing the predators. I'm not sure how well reintroducing the predators would work, I'm sure there's some evidence to be found. It's an interesting, and hard, problem. I was very specific in my wording. It started as "There are better ways" and changed to "I imagine there must be a better way" before submitting precisely because I think it is a hard problem, but I'm confident there's some answer that's better that shooting with guns. Even if there isn't, it's a worthwhile thing to study, IMHO.

Actually, as stated in the article, the other main problem is habitat creation for deer via sprawl. Deer are extremely adaptable and are perfectly happy hanging out on highway verges, fields and the like. Wolves don't like those things. Simply reintroducing predators won't work if those predators don't adapt to these new suburban ecosystems.

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.

Not to mention that fresh venison can be excellent when prepared correctly. The argument for more people "harvesting" their meat for the season can be expanded upon.

> I'm not sure how well reintroducing the predators would work, I'm sure there's some evidence to be found.

Are you suggesting that non-human predators cause less pain to deer than human hunters with guns? I highly doubt that is the case.

It's not purely about causing pain, it's about causing pain and justification. The need of the wolf and and benefit of a functioning ecosystem provides the justification, in my eyes.

If the pain inflicted on the deer is relatively equal and the desired outcome (lower deer population) is achieved then what difference does the method make.

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.

> Disperses the herds thereby extending their range,

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.

I wasn't proposing introducing predators as a short term fix, but more as a possible long term solution to reduce the need of other methods of population control. Really, I 'm espousing looking for long term, natural solutions to predator control, rather than allowing humans to fill the need just because they enjoy it. Hunting may be a vital part of population control, but IMHO whether the hunters enjoy it should have zero relevance to how likely we are to use that solution (other than it's effect on cost, which I'll concede is a factor).

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.

How do you compare the needs of a single wolf with the needs of a single human? In, for instance, a human was on a hike and was attacked my a wolf, would you approve of the human killing the wolf in defense (even though the human is essentially "trespassing" on the wolf's habitat)?

Yes, as I value a person's life more than a wolf's life. I also value bin able to be in nature. Do I think the person't life is always more important that the wolf's? Possibly not, but it would take an extreme situation. That said, I do not value a person't enjoyment of hunting more than I value the life of the animal they are hunting. That's not to say hunting isn't without benefit due to extenuating circumstance, such as it being agreed that in this area during this time this is a net good gook for the ecosystem or the people living there (e.g. population control (something I was missing originally but gladly concede at this point).

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