Yeah, you say. Cruel. I'll TELL you what "cruel" is. We stop hunting altogether and abruptly, because hunting is "cruel". But no: cruel is a bunch of deer, untouched by hunters, protected and free to do as they please, suddenly populating as they would anyway, suddenly faced with a major shortage of food. They are starving in the woods. They raid our fields and gardens. That's not cool, but what to do? Higher fences? Snort. They compete with all those cows we just set free because it was cruel to keep them. Now everyone's starving and SUFFERING and dying. Dying because they are starving. Because we thought it kinder and happier to let them be. SUFFERING. Think about the starving animals. I'll wait.
Sure, sure, the population will eventually balance, if we just left well enough alone. But when, how long? Plus, necessarily, we would see an increase of the predators as Nature tries desperately to balance her creatures. Now there are more predators killing our cats and dogs and cows and horses and chickens, not to mention our children playing in the back yard. What happens to them? We can't be cruel, so we can't kill them either. So I ask, how much starvation and death and stalking predators equals the sudden compassion and "civility" of not hunting anymore? How many years of waiting for that cycle to correct what we humans have effed up in the first place? What is the acceptable, palatable number here?
I'll wait. Go ahead and think on it.
And as you finish reading this and think, "Hm, what's green about THIS topic, GG? Do you have BBQ on the brain today, or something? This isn't your usual green fare," I say this: Green living to me means living WITH Nature, according to Nature, respecting the rules of Nature. Those rules are pretty clear. All other creatures on this planet live with Nature, by her rules. We do not. So now there are too many people and too many dogs and too many cats and too many deer and too many people (yeah I know) and not enough predators and the equation is skewed... and we hunt. And we can't just plain stop. THAT would be cruel.
I just want people to think beyond their own noses for a change. There are consequences to things.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
My point exactly!!! If we were to all go vegan tomorrow, we'd be competing with animals for food.
ReplyDeleteThis made me laugh--I actually just day before yesterday was FINALLY able to give up on my omnivorous guilt hopefully once and for all, when I read that certain insects (braconid wasps, I think) reproduce by injecting their eggs into a LIVE caterpillar, where the babies hatch and eat the thing from the inside out (I did mention ALIVE, right?) over several weeks, at which time they hatch and leave it a dead husk.
ReplyDeleteIf that's what happens in nature, I don't think I need to feel too awful about organic eggs or hamburger from an ethically raised cow.
I disagree with hunting with dogs for fun or fox hunting. But I don't see anything wrong with game hunting. It is certainly less cruel than keeping animals in a cage, then slaughtering them en mass. I buy a lot of game from a local butcher who shoots the animals themselves and the game he doesn't shoot himself (due to demand), he buys it from a guy who shoots locally. The animals are in their natural habitat and then just die quickly. Plus, it's bloody delicious!!
ReplyDeleteI would love to have a go myself, but I don't think I could shoot a deer.
More vegan perspective, I know you love it! But allow me to put by Biologist hat on here for a minute.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was studying for my biology degree, I shadowed under a professor who was researching biological diversity and sustainable hunting in nature reserves in Pennsylvania. His conclusion based on the data was that current hunting methods (deer specifically) were unsustainable and actually worsening the problem of low diversity and environmental damage.
The problem is that hunting is an industry, not a controlled biologically based technique. In Pennsylvania, they actually farm deer, because the wild population has been so selected for small unimpressive deer by human over hunting that no one wants to kill them. The wild population is also much more inbred and weak, because all of the strong trophy bucks are killed.
However, because so many deer are killed, there is more food for the survivors in the spring, and higher numbers of the remaining does produce twins and even triplets, creating a population explosion. The result is a hugely oscillating weak disease ridden population of deer which decimates the environment in the summer, and all but starves to death in the winter, forcing the game wardens to farm even more deer for hunters.
When the professor attempted to introduce his recommendations to kill only weak small does and leave bucks alone so there would be less breeding, the stronger ones would be left to breed, and there would be more deer left to compete with the weaker ones for food, creating a more stable population that the environment could adapt to, he was ignored by the local wardens. In fact, he received some death threats from local hunters for daring to mess with their sport. It would have called for them to kill less deer, and no trophy bucks at all. They didn't like that.
In short, I don't think hunting itself is bad, but it has clearly become a corrupt industry that does not have the environment or the public interest in mind at all.