The real ignorance of this is the belief that a kinder fate awaits the deer if some heartless hunter doesn't blast it with his evil assault rifle. Which is BULLSHIT.Originally Posted by charger69
There is no "old folks home" for deer. No hospital bed with clean sheets and a morphine drip. What awaits them is a certain prolonged and agonizing death.
Wild animals die almost exclusively from one of three causes: disease, privation or predation. Deer in particular never die from old age because their teeth wear out and they starve before they could live that long. They spend their entire life grinding nuts and cereal grains until finally their teeth are so worn they no longer can eat enough to sustain life. So they starve. Slowly.
Unless some obliging wolf or coyote comes along. We no longer have wolves where I live but we do have coyotes. Eastern coyotes won't generally fuck with a healthy deer, but they'll be on an old, sickly deer (or a fawn) like a duck on a junebug.
They start out by trying to bite it around the asshole. Because the other end of the deer has teeth -- if not antlers -- and the skin around the asshole is tenderer and easier to get a grip on (with their teeth). So they try to grab the deer by its asshole and pull. Until they get the lower intestine to literally pull out of its ass. Like it had shit a string of sausages.
There's no need for them to kill the deer because somewhere in the process it usually collapses from exhaustion and/or shock, but it's still quite alive while the coyotes gorge themselves on its intestines they've managed to dislodge. Last I looked there were videos of this happening on YouTube.
Nothing any deer has to look forward to (if nature takes its course) is any less cruel than a hunter's bullet. That's the part that Disney left out.
Further, hunters (and fishermen) are the only thing that prevents state-run wildlife management becoming a burden on the public. ALL state and federal wildlife preservation programs are paid for by fees paid voluntarily by hunters and fishermen. The game and fish agencies of several of the eastern states are restoring elk in places where they were eradicated more than a century ago. And there are more deer in general in the US than there were when Dan'l Boone and Col. David Crockett were alive. There are 500 times (500x) more whitetail in my home state than there were 75 years ago. And more waterfowl than the country has ever had before. Ever.
All paid for by hunters.
Why? Licensing of hunting (and using the proceeds for game management) and using the hunters themselves as unpaid agents of game management. Establishing game limits that serve to thin the herds to keep populations healthy (deer in particular are susceptible to "chronic wasting disease" -- which can decimate herds -- if they overpopulate) and to cull the animals that need to be removed from the gene pool.
How much do PETA, Earth First and the Sierra Club (collectively) pay into game management programs? Exactly $0.
Hunters pay every goddam red cent. Willingly. And provide the vast majority of the labor such a program requires, and at no charge. Without them, the burden on the general public to replicate their efforts would cost in the billion$. Per state.
Plus hunting has its own eco-system. My state figures that hunters contribute ~$10 million to local economies (and half a million to the state's tax coffers) annually by buying hunting and fishing gear and spending on gasoline, restaurants and lodging when they travel to hunt (or fish).
It's also a self-evident truth in Africa where the only countries that have thriving elephant herds also are the ones that license elephant hunting and reinvest the proceeds into elephant herd management. Because they're blessed with exotic big game animals but they're too strapped for cash to hire the manpower to prevent poachers from ravaging their herds for ivory.
Hunters pay $15,000-$25,000 dollars for a bull trophy fee in economies where $1000 will pay a game warden's salary for a year. And the state even controls exactly which elephant is to be killed, so it's always an animal that's past its prime or needs killing for the benefit of the rest of the herd. They're long past the days when considered trophy fees to be a windfall profit to be used refurbishing the president's love shack, so they oversold, to the detriment of the herd. Now they only sell to kill off the animals that make the rest vulnerable, and reinvest the proceeds in the preservation of the greater herd.
Not to mention some local village gets to feast on the animal's carcass for a month. No one wants to eat an animal that has died from "natural" causes for fear that whatever killed it might come for you next, but even that is presuming its carcass can be found and butchered before the carrion-eaters have had at it. The only thing that makes the time and place of the death of an animal predictable (thereby making the dead carcass a consumable commodity) is a licensed hunter.
We've had major declines in the US in the populations of dangerous game animals (primarily bears, big cats and wolves) but that's because of expanding populations (encroachment) and ranchers responding to predation (and financial losses) of their livestock. That's not the fault of hunting per se but hunting still provides the solution because allowing the licensed hunting of those animals monetizes them, which incentivizes the states to engage in their management.
So the wildlife population of YOUR state owes its health and robustness primarily to hunters, and it didn't cost you a single farthing. So don't lecture to me about killing deer unless and until you're doing as much to support their sustainability and general welfare as I am.
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