2. What your opinion about using hunting as a means of managing the population of some animals in some areas?

Question

2. What your opinion about using hunting as a means of managing the population of some animals in some areas? If hunting were not used to control these animals, what other methods could be used?

Answer 1

Some years ago the Everglades flooded. Many of the deer were stranded on shrinking islands and would soon drown. There were two ways to manage the herd. First allow hunters to kill the animals or allow animal rights groups in to capture the deer and relocate them.

Both methods were tried by dividing the region into hunting and capture zones. At the end of the first day (as memory serves) some hundred deer were killed to two being captured. Of the two, one died from stress.

This illustrates the advantage of hunting over other game management techniques. It's fast, you get a good count of what's taken and by targeting different members of a population (ie males, females) culling is relatively easy. Hunters also pay for licenses, guns, food, lodging transportation etc. etc. They also vote.

The alternatives aren't as cost effective or certain. Wild mustangs have over populated their range and have harmed many of the native species (remember they were introduced by the Spanish) As an example of the problem, while the government has an Adopt a horse program

"30,000 once-wild horses were never adopted and are being boarded by the agency at facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma (another 33,000 run wild). As feed and gas grow more expensive, the rate of adoptions plummets.

Boarding costs ran to $21 million last year and are expected to reach $26 million this year, out of a $37 million budget for the bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, which is intended to protect the animals. And drought lingers here in northern Nevada, where the mustangs were rounded up on a recent weekend morning to prevent them from starving. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20m...

With the mustangs adoption hasn't worked and contraception is expensive (helicopters are used to deliver shots) Starvation or the slaughter pen aren't acceptable to most of the public. Finally, there isn't enough open range left to relocate the horses.

Wyoming supports 22 elk feeding stations in the Yellowstone area. This has resulted in a high survival rate and a large population. It also has resulted in an increase of a chronic wasting disease that's killing the elk. By concentrating at feed stations the disease is communicated.

One thing to keep in mind. These are cute Disney critters. They are wild and will hurt you. Unless culled, the population will grow to large and starvation and ecological harm will result.

Answer 2

I would argue that it is almost necessary in certain cases.  Very few ecosystems function on a natural scale.  For example wolves and big cats were once abundant in the forests of the Northeastern US.  However, with the eradication of many of these big predators deer populations have the ability to explode.  Hunting can certainly provide some of the balance that is lacking from the absence if large carnivores.

I do not support hunting for trophy in any instance, but hunting for food is perhaps the most sustainable way to eat meat.

Answer 3

Because hunters tend to shoot the healthy & vigorous animals this is a poor method to manage a population. However, hunting fees allow preservation of game habitats where large numbers of non game animals thrive. Introduction of natural predators is the best method of managing a population. Unfortunately, predators will tend to clash with humans as they move into the territory..

I'm very selective of the people I allow to lease hunting rights on my property.  I have several cougars on the property & they do take a deer from time to time (although they seem to have a taste for feral piglets).

  

Answer 4

Hunting is a time-honored and effective means of population control. However, by simply reducing the number of members of a population, it is a method that creates a certain amount of stress in a population. Such stress is typically reacted against. Populations that tend to have short lifespans, lead dangerous lives, or have other similar types of stresses tend to either reproduce more quickly, mature faster, or both. The short maturation period of the American Bison is one possible reason that it survived the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, while similarly sized creatures died out.

Of course, it's not incredibly likely that hunting originally began as a means of population control. Cheetahs don't kill zebras because they think there are too many, wolves don't eat rabbits to keep the woods from getting overcrowded, and people don't shoot deer because they are clogging up the great outdoors (no, they don't, keep reading). In fact, the situation is exactly the opposite. There are more zebras than cheetahs and more rabbits than wolves because they keep getting eaten.

The deer species will get along fine without our intervention. Their population will be kept in check the same way that all populations have been kept in check since the beginning of life. If resources get scarce, some are going to die, if disaster happens, some are going to get killed. If predators are on the loose, some are going to become lunch. I'm not sure why humans think that we are somehow outside this process, but we aren't. Populations on this planet, including humans, reach equilibrium with the stresses on them.

Yellowstone National Park is the best example I can think of. In the late 20th Century, biologists noticed that the forests of the park were all old growth. No new trees had been growing to maturation for some time, and it showed. The reason for this was that the wolf population had been driven out of the park area decades ago. Wolves eat deer, and deer eat saplings, so no wolves means that the deer are free to buff up their numbers are take their time eating baby trees. Wolves were recently reintroduced to the park, and new trees are growing up today.

The fact is that population control is a method pretty much fabricated by humans. We try a moratorium on hunting, see deer everywhere the next season and think, "Oh no, the highways are going to be clogged with deer corpses, and so many of them are going to starve." Probably true, but no one seems to wonder why there aren't emaciated piles of animal corpses in other parts of the world where hunting isn't the institution we have here. For that matter, why aren't there hordes of starving badgers or armadillos? We don't hunt them like we hunt deer. How do they get along? The issue is that a stress was removed from the deer population.

If all the hunters of America suddenly lost the will to shoot deer, there would likely be a couple of bad seasons. Then the population would reach its new equilibrium, just like every population has since the beginning of everything. Except maybe for people, with our complicated social taboos and hierarchies and such.

Short answer: We're not saving these animals from anything except what we are already doing to them. Life on earth would get by just fine if people weren't here to manage everything.

Answer 5

It is called wildlife management and is a useful meathod to cull out animals.

Answer 6

Your second part answers the first

If not hunting what?

Hunters pay not only their own way but the non hunters way also

If the money for conservation does not come in the form of taxes on hunting and sporting equipment and licenses where is it to come from

The introduction of predator has proven unsatisfactory

In areas where the predators like wolves have gotten to strength the populations of Elk and other game species have been devastated

In other areas cattle and sheep have proven to be easier pickins

So now they are reopening hunting season on these predators again