Tried & True, but maybe not nice.
Message #49 of 148
KINGDOM OF HUNTING DOGS. Hunting with dogs is permitted to control the number of rodents who would spread disease, eat crops, gnaw, or damage the environment. Rodents, including rabbits, reproduce quickly and in huge numbers, which if unchecked, would multiple to the point where they would eat all the grain and vegetables before the crops even left the farm.
We would have nothing to eat, would starve to death, and become extinct, if rodent numbers were not kept down. Some other animals are a threat to us directly, or again, because they reproduce too fast, and would eat our crops.
Deer reach the maximum number the land can sustainable on a year to year level, in late winter. We will call this number 100, as it is 100% of what the land will support in winter. Then comes spring. If the number of female and male deer are equal, and each female deer has two fawns, the number of deer would be 200, double what it's carring capacity will be next winter.
For the deer not to starve to death in the winter, half the deer population has to die before winter.Nasty, but true. Some animals quickly reach the maximum number the land will support, and for each young that survives after that, an adult deer must die. There is a finite number of deer that the land has food for.
If left on their own, the starving deer would start to chew trees and kill the trees. The deer would die, and trees too. Starving deer would migrate onto roads, where they would get hit by cars, the deer would die of the injuries and sometimes the people in the car too.Hunting can provide a quicker death for the deer than starving.
Shooting deer in the fall, after the food plants have quit providing food for the deer, is a quicker death for the deer than starvation. In some areas, hunting has reduces the number of deer, so that the remaining deer have a comfortable life. In other areas, the number of deer is high for what the land will support, the deer are hungrier, less well nourished, and often can only have one fawn per year.
If the land will hold support 100 deer from year to year, and that is what is on the land at the end of winter, and then 50 fawns are produced in the spring, 50 deer will die before the end of the next winter, whether by being shot by hunter, killed by wolves or mountain lions, or, most likely, by starvation.
Once the carring capacity is reached, for each fawn born, one deer must die, because the land will only feed a set number of deer. If the land will only feed 100, and 50 more are born, either those 50 fawns must die, or, if they live and mature, 50 adult deer will die the next winter. The land can only feed so many animals.
If you have a better idea than making a sport out of it, so that hunters will go out and put down the extra deer, then post your idea, the world is waiting, because nobody else has thought up and answer yet.
The system now, is that hunters kill the extras deer off in the fall so that the deer don't starve in the winter.Please don't suggest we grow food for the deer, because the deer that live, then have more babies, the babies are grown and have babies of their own at 1 year old.
The world couldn't grow enough food to feed all the deer, because no matter how much you fed them, you'd have to double or at least half again that number of tons of feed the next year.
Rats, mice, rabbits, and other rodents reproduce even quicker. It just isn't possible to spay & neuter them all.
If the numbers weren't kept down, we would starve, and so would they because they would reproduce to the carrying capacity of the land, then for every baby rodent born, one rodent would have to die, either the baby, or if it lived, then an adult rodent. Long before that level was reached our croplands would be chewed down stubs, and rodent carried diseases would infest them and us.
The other day, I was thinking about the idea of hunting, and what could be done to stop it. I can't find and answer which will work. Either we have foxes, coyotes, and bobcats that kill the rodents, or the rodents starve, or we starve and then the rodents starve, or people kill the rodents. Then I saw this cute little squirrel.
Obviously, people had fed him, and he wanted a food. I went back and got him some peanuts, and left them at the base of the tree that I had seen him at. I felt good about that. But we can't apply that to a larger scale, because the rodents saved, reproduce, and then many more rodents need much more food the next year.
Unlike deer which have 1, 2, or 3 babies per year, rodents have huge litters. Deer have only one litter.
My pet mice had 10 to 12 babies every 21 days until I removed the male. They averaged half a baby per day, per female mouse. They were well fed, and they got nuts and seeds, and bread sopped with milk; starving mice would have less surviving babies.
While deer are pregnant from fall to spring, mice only take 21 days to produce a litter. Deer don't have their first fawn until they are a year old, mice only take months to reach maturity.
When the number of wild animal in an area gets too high and the animals nutrition become poor, disease often starts to spread among the animals.
We can't let the number of animals in an area grow to the point where animals suffer, starve, and get disease. Not just to save the animals from sickness, but to save ourselves from the diseases that overcrowded wild animals can spread.
Now you say, "oh but the hunters don't hunt to help keep animal numbers down so they don't starve" and you are right.
But if hunters stopped hunting, we would have to trick people into finding hunting fun, so they would go out and do free pest control around farming and agricultural areas, and go out in the woods, climb hills, cross cold water streams and sit quietly to shoot animals, and then carry the carcass out of the woods.
Do you have any idea what it would cost to pay people to do that if they really looked at what they were doing and said "gee, lugging a rifle up and down hills, getting wet, sitting in the cold, carrying a dead animal out, ya know what? this is NOT fun, I should be paid to do this crop protection"?
Somebody or something has to kill off the animals who there is not enough food for. If you don't want to do it, who will?
Yes, hunting goes too far sometimes with canned hunts and raising animals to turn them loose to be shot. Or misusing hunting dogs in a way that is a hunting sport, not hunting to quickly dispatch an animal.
Hunting can't end until over reproduction of wild animals does. And deer and rodents can't be all killed off, because our forest produce lumber.
Many forest are clear cut logged (no trees left) and baby trees are planted in rows like rows of corn. Somebody has to kill all the weeds. The cheapest somebody to get to do that are animals that eat weeds.
But come winter, the weeds die off, and their isn't much food for the animals, then comes spring, more weeds, then more animals, it just cycles over and over, birth and death, seeds and dried up weeds.
You can't throw out the old system (hunting) until you can up with a better plan, and use that plan to show that it works.
So far, nobody has a better plan. I like the idea of having big pools of indoor water, like swimming pools and using electricity to feed plankton (tiny, little things that live in seawater) in the pool, then harvesting the plankton.
Of course, nobody has done that yet, and while that might free up cropland, it still wouldn't solve over-reproduction of wild animals, and boom & bust population numbers.
Every see video of mice or rabbit numbers in Australia? Every once in a while, it will be dry in Australia, and the predators will be few in number, then rain will come, and the rats, mice, or rabbits will multiple, eat all the food, and start traveling in huge packs munching all the food stuffs ahead of them.
It would just about be worth going to Australia to see it, but it only happens sometimes, not every year. I have heard from one tourist who said the bus drove thru a road covered with dead rodents (I forget if they were rats or rabbits or mice) and the bus had to drive slow so not to slip on all the dead bodies, and it took a very long time, to drive thru the herds of hungry rodents.
Maybe I could skip that.That out of the way and said, I like wild animals. I like foxes, and I don't understand why they are still killed. We don't have lots of farms with loose chickens anymore. Foxes eat mice, mice eat grain and vegetables and spread disease. Foxes are good, now that we don't have loose chicken anymore.
Until somebody comes up with a better plan, that works, hunting will have to remain. Maybe global warming will make it summer all year? But don't wait on that one, it might dry things out.
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http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/pet-treaty/message/49
