Moral Ecological Dilemma

[Doc]

The only time I have heard this "hunters kill the best and strongest" argument is from a PETA girl. In fact NY hunters kill all the male deer as juveniles. Actually it is 85% at 2.5 years and younger and 99.5+ % before they are 4.5 years old. That creates an unnatural population that has insufficient adults bucks to engage in natural and normal social deer behavior. Hunters only wish to harvest the biggest and strongest in fact and practice the opposite is true.

By the way nice job on the invasive birds. Hardly anyone seems to know let alone act on that.

I suppose that as long as wildlife populations are controlled by humans, there will always be some kind of "un-natural" impact on wildlife whether it be removing critters at their earlier life stages, or taking out the best and the strongest. Man doesn't really get involved without the results being un-natural, and by the way, I doubt we could live with the results of Mother Nature's "natural" management methods......lol.

However, if we are talking about man involved in evolutionary results (as the little PETA-girl was), I think we often have our thoughts contained in too short of a time frame. True evolution involves changes over centurys and more. Yes we may force temporary, short-term behavioral changes. But I wouldn't get all excited about changing how any of the animals "evolve". Barring any intentional DNA or genetic modification experiments, I don't even believe that the practice of hunting will be around long enough to have any evolutionary effects on any of the species.

[nyantler]

Man eating up all the habitat has had the greatest impact on all wildlife... I don't see us reversing that trend any time soon. makes any chance of natural behavior a bit harder for whitetails... especially with hunters infatuation for larger deer herds and killing yearling bucks. The refusal of many hunters to see the importance of balanced herds vs habitat has gotten us where we are today.

[mike rossi]

If anyone wants to know, a book published in 1960 or 1970 era, called Mankind, by Cleveland Amory, made the argument about hunters selecting the fittest animals. That idea may have been around even earlier than that, but that is the earliest I am aware of. Amory latter founded the Fund for Animals.