81–90 of 185 posts
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>or that dairy farms don't care about their cows If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.
That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
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So hunters 'care' for animals in the ecosystem so that they can continue to kill the animals in the ecosystem? Not very convincing..
Like it or not predators hunting prey is part of any natural ecosystem. A necessary part. I don't know what it's like where you are from, but in general I'd say hunters care a lot more about, and do more for, nature in their local ecosystem than your average city dwelling vegan hipster.
A natural predator is incentivized to identify and go after a weak prey animal, b/c it's easier. Maybe this shifts the prey population to be a bit faster, or have sharper reflexes or something. But a modern human hunter may feel drawn to try to take the choicest specimen (e.g. a mature male deer with large antlers), and shoots from a distance, and a bullet moves too fast for the variance in reaction time or running speed of the animals to matter. Do human hunters using modern tech really select for fitness?
I do know that in fisheries around the world, when regulations said that only fish of a given species above a given size could be kept, fish got smaller. I.e. they were "fitter" in the sense of being more likely to be released by a human fisher, but not in the sense of having gained any advantage wrt the natural parts of their ecosystem. There are a lot of fishing competitions where the size of the largest fish trends down over time (and the records were set decades ago) not because individual competitors got worse at fishing, but because we selected against large fish.
I think the most plausible argument for human hunters being a net environmental good is just that in many places the fees associated with hunting licenses are a source of funds for actual conservation work.
I dunno. We domesticated the Rock Dove just fine.
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That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
what about disbudding, premature parent/calf separation, artifical insemination and harvesting of male calfs?
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>It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?
I guess there is the idea that hunters wish the animal species well so they can continue hunting. Tell that to the passenger pigeon, whose last existing flock was knowingly hunted, making the species effectively extinct.
Not all hunters are conservationists but most are and laws and regulations are in place to protect animal species from over hunting (at least in Canada most of the US). Some conservation efforts are almost entirely run by hunters, for instance Duck's Unlimited has majority of its members as hunters.
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>or that dairy farms don't care about their cows If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.
That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
I imagine they aren't providing much care for the males born from their cows.
In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees. I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.
And bees steal the polen and the nectar from flowers.
Of course neither the bees nor the flowers are conscious of this relationship or their roles in it as it evolved naturally from the natures of both plants and insects.
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Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by some fish's lake
Sir, please stop stealing my internet
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>or that dairy farms don't care about their cows If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.
That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.