My hunting-related rant for the year- get ready to be offended! :) : With hunting seasons underway in much of the U.S., Ive been seeing lots of angry post by well-meaning people demonizing hunting and claiming that they love nature and cant stand people killing wild animals. Well, here are some facts to consider before you start bashing hunting and hunters. Every hunter buys licenses and permits each year which total over a half a billion dollars in revenue for state game commissions. Just here in Pennsylvania, that money has been used to buy up over 1.4 million acres of land to protect from development as state gamelands. Thats more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Thats habitat for millions of wild birds, and literally trillions of insects, preserved using resources from hunters. And thats just in Pennsylvania. You get rid of hunting, and youd better have another method of funding to protect all that habitat from development. Lets face it- habitat destruction is the number one killer of species in the U.S. Letting people harvest species that are already overpopulated in exchange for money that indirectly protects thousands of other species that are in decline sure seems like a win-win to me. How many more species of insects would you like to be extirpated from the Northeast because the absurdly huge deer populations ate all their host plants? How many hundreds of Cerulean Warblers would you like to lose their nesting areas because the Gamelands they breed on get bought up by developers? I think the reason people jump all over hunters as villains is that you can directly SEE the animals they kill. I get this sort of reaction all the time when people see a box of my moth collection- Oh, you KILLED them all?! How horrible! You should be ashamed! Yet when I say that I went to Disney World, I dont hear people say You gave hundreds of dollars to a place that wiped out 25 thousand acres of prime wetlands leading to the deaths of trillions of moths and thousands of birds?! How horrible! You should be ashamed! No one cares. Because we dont SEE those dead animals. We dont SEE the billions of insects that die when a field is cleared to plant corn for us to eat. We dont SEE the chickens stuffed into crates to make your chicken nuggets. We dont SEE the starving wetland birds displaced by development of our favorite mall. We dont SEE the 2 million Dickcissels slaughtered to prevent them from eating some crops in Venezuela. We dont SEE the millions of birds killed by peoples outdoor cats. We dont SEE the million birds that rely on hunter dollars to survive, so it wouldnt really mean much to us to hear that theyve disappeared. And thats the real problem. We are each responsible for the deaths of many thousands of animals, from the agricultural practices that provide us with food, to the bugs slaughtered at our porch lights and on our windshields, to the displaced animals that once lived in the habitats that were destroyed for our houses and stores to exist. Its just the way things are. Its unavoidable if we want society to continue to exist. And acknowledging that, and accepting that, and not ignoring it, is an important part of understanding what it means to be human. Because once we KNOW what our impact is, and we UNDERSTAND our relationship with the natural world around us, then we can work to minimize and curb our impact. The I just dont want to SEE the dead animal attitude is indicative of what is wrong with our society- we ignore our own impact on the environment, and then demonize anyone else who actually acknowledges theirs. Its like covering your eyes and ears and pretending that if you dont see the impact we are having, then it isnt really happening. In the case of hunting, the demonizing is particularly hypocritical, because hunting in the U.S. is one of the few leisure activities that actually involves PROTECTION of habitat, rather than just using up resources. Hunters are the most honest people out there when it comes to acknowledging their impact- theyre actually willing to say here is the animal that I killed today. If it offends you to see that, or if you think youre more moral or ethical than them for refusing to hunt, it only shows your own ignorance as to what your personal impact on the environment has been. And thats not something to be proud of. Rant. Over.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:54:48 +0000
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