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I feel bad if I swat a fly or remove ants and other insect or rodents. It's unfortunately necessary.
Population control of deer is also necessary in areas with high density. I don't think I can do it, but I understand why it's necessary.
I also understand that hunting as a hobby is as much about enjoying the nature. I can do this fine without having to kill anything though. I'm not very competitive but if I wanted to use nature in a more challenging way, I'd probably hunt with a camera instead, which would still satisfy the game aspect of it.
My dream would be to own an area large enough to let nature exist alongside the humans, but this is just not possible for everyone to do. There's no wilderness left for nature where I live, so I guess population control is the only compromise for letting wild animals coexist with humans.
As for animal welfare I think meat production is a much more important part to regulate. It's disgusting how animals are breed only to be slaughtered without even having a chance to enjoy life even a little.
Prey animals overpopulate because we've gotten rid of predators.
But the way it works in nature is that an underpopulation of prey leads to a decrease in predators (starvation) which leads to an overpopulation of prey which leads to an overpopulation of predators which leads to an underpopulation of prey... not sure there's any way to escape cruelty in nature even if you don't want to participate in it.
Cruelty isn't a relevant concept in nature. I always remeber that picture of a baby mknkey clinging to his mother dangling from the fangs of a leopard...
A point that came to my mind when reading you comment: Yes, nature would (more or less cruely) regulate prey populations through predators, ressource depletion ( read starvation) or pathogens. However we humans need to use the landscape in one way or another to generate our means of living. That being said what we today mostly aren't observing natural landscapes where natural regulation works but man made ones where we can't leave the regulation up to nature entirely due to our selfinterest.
We should aim for natural systems and regulation wherever that is feasible but at the same time will have to accept the fact that we'll always need to intervene, or kill, to a certain degree as we're dependent on using the system for our subsistence.
We don't need to hunt to subsist when we can exist on a plant-based diet. The practical reason to get rid of predators is primarily to prevent livestock depletion, and also baby-snatching (dingos) and Fifi-grabbing. Personally, I'm not OK with getting eaten by a tiger or a boa constrictor, so I totally undersand why people would want to eliminate human predators.
There's a philosopher, who also happens to be a talking gorilla, that pointed out humans, as a species, eliminate anything that competes with it for food. Modern humanity has absolutely no balance with nature, and, if the fate of the mammoth is an example, never did.
Yes and no. The point I was trying to make isn’t that we need meat to survive, but that the cultural landscape (where we also grow our plant-based food) has been reshaped by us to such an extent that natural regulatory processes no longer function or are no longer sufficient to maintain balance. `
You’ve raised a point here that I think I can use to illustrate my point quite well: I live in Central Europe, and one of the wild species found here that is heavily hunted is the wild boar. Wild boars are normally (if we focus solely on predators and set aside bad weather and epidemics) regulated mainly by wolves and perhaps, to a certain extent, by brown bears. The problem is that our modern cultural landscape offers the adaptable wild boars much more food than they would naturally find: In the spring (during the nursing season), there are many available meadows where they can root for mice, earthworms, and other small creatures; then in the summer, first the milk-ripe grain, then the fully ripe grain, followed by corn well into the fall; and then, due to climate change, one bumper crop year after another (which, of course, occurs less frequently). The result is population growth rates of up to 200%. So we would also need a much higher density of wolves and brown bears to regulate the populations in the same way as in a natural system. I dare to doubt whether this is possible, or, given the potential for encounters between wolves and humans, even desirable, in metropolitan areas and lowlands without sufficient forest cover.
I therefore believe that we cannot do without some form of human regulation (whether through hunting or some other method), since we rely on exploiting these systems in a non-natural way.
Yes, excellent points.
I never thought of bown bears as apex predators--the black ones around here subsist on berries and our grizzlies are largely pescatarians. Found some videos of skirmishes between boars and bears though.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3-4J8aWYmE
Thanks for the interesting video!
It really is a clash of the titans when you consider just how big a full-grown brown bear is... I also find the setting interesting: For one thing, it seems to be winter, and strangely enough, the bear isn’t hibernating (I actually thought they’d have been sleeping for a long time with that much snow on the ground). On the other hand, the deep snow might also be preventing the wild boar from simply fleeing from the bear (I seem to recall, for example, that moose are primarily killed by wolves in winter because they’re slower in deep snow than in summer). Finally, this is a damn big (and confident) boar. Since he’s out on his own, I’d guess he’s a male boar, and even a whole pack of wolves probably wouldn’t dare take him on (at that size)... maybe that’s why he’s so confident in the face of the bear. ^^
Looks like the bear is more afraid of the boar, but in the snow, the boars charge would be blunted, so I'd give the advantage to the bear's paw.
We do have boar in parts of the United States, but my main exposure to them has been in stories of royal medieval hunting parties (including GoT).