Hunting deer in the US, hunting kangaroos in Australia – both are necessary. We killed almost all their natural predators, but that doesn’t stop them from breeding (deer usually have twin fawns mind). They deplete their food resources and it leads to deer slowly dying of starvation, which is much worse than being shot imo. While we shouldn’t have killed all our apex predators, hindsight isn’t exactly useful in these situations. Death by predation has always been an important part of nature, but without any predators I don’t take issue with humans taking charge. Nature isn’t “pro-life” as it were – things have to die to maintain a balance. Also, hunters give a lot of money for conservation causes – they want to keep being able to hunt. I don’t hunt personally but I live in the Midwest where just about everyone else does and I don’t have a big problem with it.
I heard of a case of some people who owned houses together on a farm. This farm had a number of wild blesbok and some jackals. The majority of the property owners refused to have the jackals culled even when they attacked sheep on the neighboring farms. They also refused to have the blesbok even when the herd had more rams than ewes. One of the property owners was the veterinarian that told his story. He and a friend found a blesbok that had gotten stuck between two electric fences, the animal had run up and down the fence the whole night. They caught and released it, exhausted, back onto the property. It was killed the same day and it’s carcass was consumed in 2 days. That same year, every blesbok calf that was born, was killed by jackals before it was a week old. Only then did the property owners consent to jackal culling. More than 20 animals were culled and even then some remained.
Humans have interfered so much in nature, changing ecosystems and putting up fences. It would be unethical to just leave nature to sort itself out after we wiped out its normal structures. This is why I have no problem with hunting for the sake of population control.
Back when I lived in Minnesota there was one year where they PAID people to hunt deer. They paid YOU to get a deer tag and hunt a deer. They even had rangers hunt deer and donate the meat to local zoos and homless shelters. This is because the deer had overpopulated so badly that you would see a dead one every 100 yards on the road. They were so overpopulated that they were just dying everywhere. Then the eagles and scavangers would have a party on the roads and guess what, more roadkill. It was really really sad to see. And it’s all because people killed off most of the wolf and coyote population. And still to this day they insist on letting people hunt the miniscule number of wolves in the state.
So I’ve seen the bad side and the good side of hunting all in one year. The side that is just for money and the side that is meant to help the environment.
This is why I’m against hunting things like coywolves. After hundreds of years a capable predictor is finally making it’s way back into the ecosystem to help control prey populations. Even if it is a “new” species it’s still a part of nature.
There needs to be a lot of control and regulation over hunting. And there is. But I think money will always have more priority over actual conservation efforts sometimes.
1) they DON’T hunt whitecoats. it’s only adult seals
2) the process is as quick and painless as possible. there’s a special technique in clubbing for an instantaneous death. hunters are very well trained and don’t hunt with the intention of harming the animal any more than it needs to be
3) not only is it government regulated but hunters only reach maybe 15 percent of their annual quota
4) seals consume an obscene amount of fish. to the point where it’s actually detrimental to the environment to have the population of seals get too high
5) seal meat is incredibly nutritious and an important resource for communities up north
6) these animals live in the wild their full lives until the need to be hunted
7) the cost of typical southern food up north is often 10 times as high and it’s very expensive to live off a diet without using the lands provided resources
seal meal is a very nutritious important resource that’s ethically sourced and important for indigenous people not only culturally but for survival through economic means and resources. equating indigenous practices to the mass consumption that the colonist meat industry enforced is a false equivalence. specifically targeting communities limited recourses and attacking indigenous people is an act of racism. try decolonizing your perception of how the world operates. we aren’t like you.
It’s so nasty that one of the greatest loss of seals is from commercial farming, by way of by fishing. (Sea creatures getting caught while they’re fishing for other sea creatures) and yet, indigenous populations who are deliberately being starved out by the colonizer government where they live are who are condemned for sealing? For survival hunting, where the animal’s suffering is as minimal as possible? While living where the most basic groceries are priced as luxury goods?
It’s an age old trick. Keep people blaming the oppressed group, keep people stomping on those below them, so they don’t look up at those who are stomping on them.
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