Defending Hunting

I may be the only vegetarian in the world to defend hunting, but so be it.

Susan Stellin's piece on deer hunting in Maine gets at an important point: the divide between urban people who think of deer as cute little creatures and the decreasing number of people who live in rural places and still survive in part off the land.

Why do I support the hunters in this divide? Humans need to understand that there is no wilderness. There is nothing in the world not affected or managed by humans. Every spot on the planet, every species on the planet has been changed by human beings. We manage everything. So we might as well manage it right.

When it comes to deer, we have three management choices:

1. We can not allow any hunting. The problem is that the deer will starve to death. This can happen incredibly quickly. Once deer hunting became restricted on Arizona's Kaibab National Forest in the 1900s and 10s, animal populations erupted. By the late 20s, deer were dying by the droves from starvation. While lots of urban dwellers would probably like to see all hunting ended, they have to understand that things aren't all fun and cute in the forest. The animals will die, and in a pretty slow and painful way.

2. We can reintroduce wolves to the forests. Reintroducing wolves to the forest would provide the population control needed if we aren't going to have hunting. The reason the deer populations explode is that they are not culled by predators. Wolves are the natural top predator in American forests. So this would go a long ways to solving the problem. The problem with wolves is that rural folks would go completely insane with fury. While wolf reintroductions have had some success in the northern Rockies, in southern Arizona and New Mexico, the reintroductions have been an almost total failure, as the locals demand the states kill the wolves immediately. Wolves will eat cattle as well as deer. That has to be recognized. Plus you have people's instinctual fear of wolves, which is what really drives the opposition here.

I support this option. While there is more support for wolf reintroduction every year, rural people in this country have so much power in relation to their actual population that large-scale reintroductions are quite unlikely.

Thus we have option 3: hunting. This is working pretty well. There are tons of deer everywhere, yet they are not starving. It's sad I guess to kill an animal. I hope I never have reason to do it. But from a larger management standpoint, hunting is a responsible management option. So long as we don't have wolves culling the deer, hunting makes a lot of sense and has my support.