From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri May 02 2003 - 10:34:59 MDT
Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>... In the end if you are attempting to get people to take sides I will go
>with the hunters and fishers. I'll get out my old rusty shotgun and fishing
>rods and get right out there.
>Ron h.
>
More to the point, we have decimated the population of wolves, courgars,
etc., so the deer don't experience the predation that they evolved to
expect. Either we replace it somehow, or the deer suffer massively.
I'm not convinced that hunters are more cruel than wolves or cougars.
Birth control is expensive, difficult, and of questionable permanence
(political climates change...rapidly). So either you introduce a
non-human predator, or you allow people to predate. There are plusses
and minuses to both solutions, but predators that will attack deer are
all too likely to attack vulnerable humans, if the hunting is poor. And
the reaction to that will be to restrict the range of the predator,
which will leave the deer...
Also, if people predate on deer, they will tend to avoid human
habitations. And gardens. (Not sufficiently to avoid the need for 15
foot tall fences, but enough to help.) If deer are invoilate, then they
will invade gardens freely. (Around where I live, more deer are killed
by cars than by guns...considerably more. And that's dangerous to the
driver, but deer aren't careful pedestrians, and can't always be avoided.)
I'm not particularly informed about fishing, perhaps sport fishing is
different, but my understanding is that commercial fishing vastly
overfishes the areas that they fish in. This is a variant of the
tragedy of the commons. Boats don't have their own herds of fish, so
they don't have any direct penalty from avoiding overfishing one, and
they do get a direct advantage, but if several different boats overfish
several different schools of fish, they all suffer. (This is
oversimplified, as fish aren't territorial in the way that is implied,
but it's a reasonable first cut.) OTOH, another part is just the
short-term profit view of modern companies. Forrestry companies do the
same thing. Traditional family businesses would do a rotated harvest of
a forest, allowing one area to come to maturity while harvesting
another. Modern corporations clear cut an area, and then sell it off to
developers, destroying the forest in the process. (Yes, as I described
it, it's illegal. But the laws have lots of loopholes, and the
corporations have lawyers to find them...or helped write the laws in the
first place.) This doesn't give them a sustained return, but it gives
them a larger quick return, that they can then invest elsewhere. (So
perhaps short-term is the wrong criticism...but I don't know what
descriptive term would be more appropriate.)
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 02 2003 - 10:45:31 MDT