COLORADO COLLEGE- I didn’t get to see yesterday’s CC lecture, HUNTING: BLOOD SPORT OR WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT TOOL?
I was keenly interested to hear the moral arguments behind playing god over the animal kingdom. It’s easy to justify regulating wild populations no longer held in equilibrium by natural factors. Would it be unlikely not to feel called to play gamekeeper to Earth’s human scourge as well?
State of the Rockies Project 2008-2009 Wild Rockies Speaker Series brings Kent Ingram, former president and current board member of the Colorado Wildlife Federation, and Dave Crawford, former executive director of the Rocky Mountain Animal Defense, to discuss their positions on the role of hunting as a means of wildlife management.
Is it for fun, for the preservation of life on Earth, or both?
You know, of course, that these are the same people who oppose releasing native-but-almost-extinct predators back into the Ecosystem,
because instead of the humans culling God’s Herds, God would use his grizzly bears and bobcats and wolves to cull their herds as well as His own?
On the Indian side of things, hunting (but pardon this, not my tribe actually, the Cherokee were more into organized Agriculture and actual trade than subsistence hunting, it was a very successful economy for us until 1837) is a way to feed ones family.
Not a sport, and not Management of anything besides the human part of Spirit Medicine.<<==two words that would take a book to translate…
I wonder how the lower-case “c” “christians” in the Boone and Crockett Club would feel realizing that taking pieces of dead animals and hanging them on their walls for decoration is pre-pagan Shamanist Magic?
I’ve read and heard pastors talking about Indians using feathers being “Godless” idolatry.
Some people hang the deer head in the dining room.
So the deer can watch you eat him, I suppose.
Here’s another thought…
“Culling” the herds would only be effective if the females were shot.
Killing the strongest, healthiest males only takes out the strongest healthiest males.
Which leaves the weaker males to father the next generation.
The libido of a Buck in Rut is legendary. So much so that 1 buck can mount every bit as many females as two or three or four or five… bucks can do.
The female can only get pregnant once per season.
Also, in the Human Equivalent of “Culling the Herd” aka the Draft, and War, it’s mostly the young Males who are killed off.
And, both the Human Females AND the Human Males become more fecund after a kill-off. During a Kill-off. In the face of an impending Kill-off.
So do all other mammals. Coyotes, for instance, in areas where their population is left alone, therefore stable, only throw two litters a year and smaller litters, like 3 or 4 pups until the population reaches Maximal Sustainability. Then it’s 1 or 2 pups.
Start with a “Culling” campaign and the number of litters doubles and the number of pups per litter increases by 50%.
It’s why the Human Population INCREASES in a War.
WW2 and the Baby Boom, prime example.
Famines, pestilences, other Wars, “culling” millions at a time, but the population has doubled since WW2.
It’s not surprising that the people who advocate Culling also advocate the National Rifle Association, which was founded by a Yankee general after the Civil War because the Northerners were largely untrained in, and unfamiliar with, the use of firearms.
They even cite the “improved” kill ratio of Americans/Targets as a success story.
And, they support the “We broke it, we gotta fix it” amoral Euphemism and Sophistry for Why We Have To Stay In Iraq.
Much like the NRA and the Boone & Crockett Club, with their “Cull” program.
Maybe, you know, if we didn’t just allow the People Who Were Stupid Enough To Break Things to be the ones who decide how to Fix them.