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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).