DarkenedWolfEye said:
Bruin said:
Always, until it depletes the natural balance of things.
Humans are predators and without predators the ecosystem is thrown off.
True, but making a successful kill nowadays is easier than it used to be. It used to be that a whole group of us armed with primitive weapons had to band together to take down one animal, depending how big or dangerous it was, and this was such a difficult and risky task that we were happy to get red meat once a month.
Now, with a gun and good aim, we can kill pretty much anything that doesn't have a bulletproof skull. Humans are becoming too proficient as predators; this isn't even counting indirect killing via depletion of habitat.
I don't mind hunting so long as you make full use of the body (by which I mean eat it) and therefore don't waste the animal's death, and so long as it is strictly controlled to avoid overhunting. Anything else I cannot condone.
Humans.
Always so self-absorbed.
It doesn't matter how we kill them, as long as we kill them.
Generally, it's a rule that there's growers, plant-eaters, meat-eaters who eat the plant-eaters and meat eaters who eat the meat eaters.
Everybody has a place on the chain. Ours is at the top, at this time. We kill everything on the list and consume them all. It is our natural place nature has given us. Nothing is strange about it in any way, shape or form.
It is the predator nature has evolved us into being. The creature we were always going to be.
What is strange and unnatural is when man upsets the balance nature has established. This is why tigers have enormous hunting ranges, why wolf-packs kill one another for straying into other territories. Encroach on that land and you risk starving out those wolves. Some may see it as survival of the fittest, but in this case, we will topple everything beneath us if we kill everything for the sake of killing it.
But that scenario is impossible. There aren't enough hunters in the world, put simply, to get that job done without military force.
Remove the emotional aspect of things. You're talking from a viewpoint that is less than a hundred years old compared to an order that has been established over four billion years of careful evolution and planning. The animal is going to die--a set number of animals MUST die, actually, to keep the population healthy. Whether for food or for sport, they have to die. And if you eliminate predators like wolves (Looking at you, Europe), you create an enormous imbalance so that another predator has to fill the void or else you risk overpopulation by the prey species.
And all too often does man forget to count himself among the beasts. And we're too quick to forget that we're predators as well. Look at your canines in the mirror next time you brush your teeth. I find it's a good reminder--something you can't exactly get rid of and something that is a part of you.
And you're chalking up man's hunting capacity. Those dead deer on the side of the ride are an overflow. A surplus, I suppose, of creature. Count in all the deer-hitting accidents in a year combined and you still don't have the normal amount of deaths there would be from predators like wolves if man hadn't driven them out from "his" land. The only creatures man has hunted to extinction are ones we want something from commercially. And the one thing we should never underestimate about man next to his ability to kill himself, is his ability to be the greediest animal on the planet.
All the rest we've killed indirectly through deforestation. And those are usually fragile species at best, and as much as I sound cold for saying it--it's Darwinism. You can't adapt in a world without your ideal forest? You die. That rare treefrog in the Amazon who can only exist in one square mile patch of the forest which is presently being cut down is not going to make it in the long run anyway.
