I have come to terms with the fact that if someone doesn't thin out the herds of deer, rabbits, rats, mice, other rodents, hogs, and flocks of birds...
...we would soon have no farm crops for ourselves, our friends, and our families.
I like wildlife, but I need food too, and so do you.
I've looked at this from every angle, and the only thing that would work, is for people worldwide to have smaller families. The wildlife can't compete with humans destroying their forests to make houses and fields for more of us. Nothing else will protect animals.
As every bit of usable land becomes used, even cats & dogs will be seen as a threat to somebody's food. It is possible that starving countries could seek to destroy pets in agricultural countries to make more food for their growing number of people. Worldwide food shortage, or high food prices due to high demand, is a strong motivator for war, especially more modern forms of warfare.
If we had one tenth or even one fourth of the people we now have to feed, we could be tolerant of animals eating some crops. I remember reading somewhere long ago about planting 3 plants for every plant you want: one for the bugs, one for the birds, and one for yourself (author unknown).
We haven't been that tolerant in a long time, we have pesticides for the bugs, which one way or the other hurts the number of birds. But poisons that kill rodents can kill us, dead rodents in our fields of crops decomposing with a belly full of chemicals that are harmful us, doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but what other choice is there?
Do you have any idea how much it would cost to pay people to kill rats? And deer? deer are so good at hiding, it might take one person 2 days to get one deer.
Deer are pretty, and graceful, and I love them, but when they over multiply they starve, and starving deer get desperate, they roam looking for food, they cause car wreaks because they run in front of cars, and in hunger, the deer kill trees and plants, and get sick and spread disease and parasites, like Lyme's disease.
How can we keep the numbers of wild animals down, without spending massive amounts of money or loosing our food?
There is no additive we can leave out to sterilize them, and it is not possible to spay/ neuter all the wild rabbits and rodents.
Maybe you would like to help give these wild animals a quick death instead of a slow one? A large number of wild animals die every year, because they have so many young.
If a patch of land will support 100 deer in the winter, but in the spring the 50 female deer have a total of 75 young, then there are 175 deer in the spring, on a patch of land which will only hold 100 deer in the winter. 75 deer must die before winter.
Either they roam and starve, damaging the trees and plants the other animals need too, endanger traffic, and eat our crops, or somebody has to go out and give them a quick death.
Without predators, rodents would eat everything edible.
If you can think of a better way to convince people that it is fun to go out and get rid of rodents and rabbits who invade our crops, great, but until you can get your method of controlling rodent numbers to work, the current plan is to call it "hunting" and get people to spend their free time out in the areas near farmlands and woodlands shooting wild animals who don't shy away from people.
Myself? I would rather play on a computer than sit quietly in a deer stand for the weekend.
And I don't like shoveling snow (which is light weight), so I know that I would not want to dig rodents out of holes, and you can have all the dead rats you want, I wouldn't eat them, and I certainly wouldn't clean them and cook them.
And I have no intention of buying a catch dog, loving the dog then risking it hunting hogs. Hogs grow big. But if you want to get rid of the feral hogs, I guess that's okay, maybe even good. A hog is a hog. The ones sold in the store maybe never got to run free, maybe the feral ones were luckier, maybe they weren't. If the feral ones were hungry and diseased, maybe the ones at the hog farm were happier, maybe they weren't, I don't know.
But I do know that female hogs have litters before they are full grown, and keep having more litters. The only way to keep the quality of life up for feral hogs, is to keep their numbers down. Nobody has found a better way to do that than hunting.
Maybe someone wants to go out and castrate feral boars, and implant IUD in feral sows? You don't get just how big, aggressive, and strong jawed hogs are? That's not safe. And fat hogs tend to absorb the anesthesia.
If you have a better idea, type away, because nobody else has found one.
Except maybe this: instead of us going out and thinning the herds, let's convince other people that building a little platform on a tree, and sitting there without moving, no radio, no phone, no talking, no smoking, no noise, no moving around for two days is so much fun that they will lug guns, ammo, and hunting stands for hours to get to a place with less people so they will have a chance to shoot a deer.
Let's convince people, not to get a nice friendly dog, but a pack of hyper active hunting dogs, and let them get up before dawn and drive to the farm edges and chase rabbits, hares, and rodents?
Let's see if terrier people will spend their day having their dog corner a rodent underground, and then have the person dig down to the rodent to destroy it. I like that better than rat turds in what's left of our food, because we can't get rid of enough rats. Rodent droppings and hairs are in human food. Not enough people are convinced that rat hunting is fun.
What can I say? Breed more Rat Terriers and Feists, and get their owners to kill more feral rats.
Did you see that video of rats in the fast food place? Have you ever seen films of rats and rabbits when they have a good year? - there are videos of vast swarms of rodents in Australia, which have been shown on TV occasionally.
That's what happens when an animal has so many young so often, and nothing slows them down, they form herds that eat their way forward across the land.Permission to crosspost.
Link:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/pet-treaty/message/46
Permission to cross-post.
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