savoloysam
Pisces Moon
Overly populated "human planet" doesn't like other animals breeding too much.
Deer and how to deal with them
- Thread starter not-bono-ever
- Start date
Overly populated "human planet" doesn't like other animals breeding too much.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Wild herbivores don't prevent the growth of new woodland anyway. The opposite in fact. They clear spaces that can be colonised by the brambles and scrub that tree saplings can then use as cover to get themselves established. Farming is the ecological disaster.
If deer were in the habit of destroying woodlands they'd have gone extinct long before humans showed up.
If deer were in the habit of destroying woodlands they'd have gone extinct long before humans showed up.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
So, there's a problem with the deer population exploding, and your answer is to feed them more.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Other countries maybe don't have 90% of the land owned by 1% of the population.
I don't eat meat but I wouldn't have a problem with people going out and killing a wild animal for food. But you can't do that in this country because every square inch of everywhere is owned by some cunt and with it, somehow, all the wild animals that live there.
There's a sign by the river near me. No fishing for food. So you can catch a fish and toss it back, wounded and suffering, but you can't cook it and eat it. Somehow we've got an attitude where killing for fun is OK, killing for food is not. Class again I suppose. The toffs don't need to catch fish or rabbits for food and they hate the idea of anyone but themselves getting anything for free. So they put their thumbs on the the scale of culture for a few centuries and now here we are.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'd love to see wolves and lynx return. Unfortunately many people have strange ideas about wolves and are quite anti, so it will probably cause problems of various kinds. And more hunting as well as and where necessary, with the meat sold locally as suggested. Monbiot isn't quite right that culling doesn't happen. As kebabking has pointed out, it does.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Also hunters in this country knowingly create environmental crises. That prick Alexander Darwall who recently tried to ban camping on Dartmoor has been begged by nature organisations to stop releasing thousands of pheasants every year because in a few weeks they eat all the invertebrates that should sustain countless other bird, mammal, amphibian and reptile species; some of which have few other habitats in the UK besides Dartmoor. Darwall doesn't give a shit about any of it obviously, because there's money to be made selling his pheasant-killing weekends to other city finance types wanting to have a play at being rural gentry.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
He's kept it up during a bird flu epidemic as well, the cancerous fucking bellend.
NoXion
You remain unbroken, for your fight... is Eternal
Oooh, edgy.
Deer destroy woodlands because there are no longer enough predators about to make sure they no longer eat everything.
Sport fishing certainly doesn't make any sense to me. Why bother catching a fish if you're not going to eat it?
So what you're saying is that an overabundance of a particular species has a deleterious effect on an ecosystem? Like when there are too many deer and not enough predators?
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Deer, last time I checked, weren't deliberately bred and released on an industrial scale. Pheasants are.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
This, 'wild animal x will destroy their food source unless we kill them all' thing was crap when it was sparrowhawks eradicating garden birds, crap when badgers were murdering all the hedgehogs and crap now deer are eating all the trees.
Natural systems are not steady-state, there are booms and busts. You can't claim to care about living things and then whinge about them behaving as all living things do. Stop breeding sheep and cattle for slaughter, leave the land and the creatures on it to do their own thing and see whether we still have a problem with excess wild herbivores or if the problem was us all along.
Natural systems are not steady-state, there are booms and busts. You can't claim to care about living things and then whinge about them behaving as all living things do. Stop breeding sheep and cattle for slaughter, leave the land and the creatures on it to do their own thing and see whether we still have a problem with excess wild herbivores or if the problem was us all along.
Humberto
Take me up to Monto
Would that not in practice merely involve an element of displacing the problem though? Agree that current farming practices are dysfunctional in this country and most others.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Given that this is an island with no large predators, I can see the case for (re)introducing some. Generally though I think the best solutions involve getting humans out of the way of as much land as possible. If we stop eating meat, the amount of land we need to feed ourselves would be greatly reduced. And one of the most destructive things we do, grazing large animals at high densities over large areas, goes away.
And yeah if we abandon livestock farming and then people want to go out and catch some of the wild critters in the newly regenerated habitats for food, well that's all part of how life is supposed to work. Cows knee deep in their own shit for months on end, chickens that never see the sun, that's not supposed to happen. It comes at a cost to all life, us included.
And yeah if we abandon livestock farming and then people want to go out and catch some of the wild critters in the newly regenerated habitats for food, well that's all part of how life is supposed to work. Cows knee deep in their own shit for months on end, chickens that never see the sun, that's not supposed to happen. It comes at a cost to all life, us included.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Except that humans have removed all the deer's predators. That's not a natural system.
Like it or not, we do have to manage our environment - precisely because we've changed it so much.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
On an island where all large predators have been eradicated, I can see the case for re-introduction. But I do think the whole thing needs to be reframed as how can we undo some of what we have done, not how can we get rid of these deer who are fucking with our otherwise really functional system.
NoXion
You remain unbroken, for your fight... is Eternal
Humans have bene mucking around with the environments on this island for thousands of years. Anything short of reforesting the entire thing is going to be an artificial state of affairs. Management is a necessity.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
Where did you get that from?
From what I've seen it's only chicks under a month old that eat mostly insects after that they eat mostly seeds, berries, buds etc. Birds reared for shooting are raised in pens and fed an artificial food.
not-bono-ever
meh
FWIW, much of europe manages to retain legit hunting for consumption without guns being an issue. We dont have that culture here,really apart from proper country types who mostly use their gear properly.Its an important cultural thang for say Germany, where urban dwellers will go hunting in the same way people go fishing here . As SpookyFrank mentioned, the land ownership here is an abberation that compounds the problem of predator and prey balance. Dont want to turn this into a hunting discussion but yeh. I know on the Scots estates, although the Randolphs will go up for an expensive social week of shooting, they make little impact on the deer population - long gone are the monarch of the glen days where trophy deer were something to be prized.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yep, although tbf Monbiot seems to understand this. He's after reversing the whole of the last 10,000 years of human history.
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Birds reared for shooting are raised in pens and fed an artificial food.
And then what happens to them?
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
So cane toads should be allowed to endanger all kinds of native Australian fauna?
Yeah it was a fucking stupid idea using them as pest control in the first place but simply say have at it, is a terrible idea.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
They would be released well after a month old so would mostly eat seeds, buds etc and the occasional insect.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent.
The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.
So there’s some other stuff we could be looking at…
The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.
So there’s some other stuff we could be looking at…
SpookyFrank
Float like a caterpillar, sting like a tree
Dartmoor landowner who won wild camping ban may be putting rare beetle at risk
Exclusive: Alexander Darwall, who said he brought case to improve conservation, is releasing pheasants near protected woodland
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I think it's an idea that has legs, but only alongside other ideas and other considerations. I find some of the assumptions behind it questionable. What is 'wild'? Its definition appears to be something like 'an environment without humans in it'. Well that's not the world we live in, and it appears to include ideas of human exceptionalism, placing us somehow apart from nature rather than part of it. In many parts of the world, including the UK, most environments are going to have humans doing their human things in them or nearby. How do we produce healthy, sustainable, biodiverse environments with humans in them or nearby? That's a harder but perhaps more fruitful question to address.
