Tap
5 year old buck +
Tap,
For the record, I am not opposed to your (or anyone else's) hunting as long as you don't do it on my land. I don't have any issue with it. I am trying to get you to understand that the two groups of people who point fingers at one another - wildlife advocates and hunters - are two sides of the same coin. Both are "using" animals for their own enjoyment and neither types of persons is actually necessary for the survival of the animals. The problem with the ungulates, mainly the deer, is that we have exterminated all of their natural predators. There are no more wolves and pumas in most places and coyotes are destroyed whenever people can find them. I, personally, like the coyotes on my land because they help keep the rabbits in check. I have lots of apple trees - all of which were labor intensive to plant and expensive to buy or create - and the rabbits reign havoc on them. They were literally destroying my land - eating anything and everything I tried to plant ....then one day along came a family of grey foxes. Within a season, there were no more problem rabbits. The rabbit population was under control. Deer overrun the place so the gobble up the garden almost as soon as I can plant it. Because we are smarter than deer and have more money than they do, I solved the problem by puttng up fences around the garden and blueberry orchard. Unfortunately, coyotes are too small to properly manage the herds of deer which are overrunning our lands. I love coyotes on my property but they can't do the job required to keep the deer under control. They are simply not big enough. I would love to see the return of the wolf but I doubt that will ever happen. Yes, I DO know that wolves and coyotes prey upon people's pets so, for that reason, I keep my cats indoors and my dogs under supervision at all times. I try to keep my land as wild as possible. The simple fact is that we do not have enough natural predators for the deer because we humans exterminated them all. If we had more wolves and pumas - in their natural territories which happens to include my (and probably your) land - we would not be overrun with deer. Thst being said, I still like to watch the deer nibble the corn on the bottom of my porch steps and I still want to go up and train the wild turkey to come to a whistle.......and you still will want to hunt. It's all fine with me. I don't have an issue with it. I am far less concerned with hunters than I am with the bear(s) figuring out where my supply of corn is. I don't want THEM on my back porch and I don't want them smashing my sliding glass doors (which they can do) so as to get at the storage bins of seed and corn which I keep inside. I am far more concerned about that than I am about any stray bullet from a hunter.
Lois, You are mistaken when you separate hunters from wildlife advocates. We are not "2 sides of the same coin", in many cases, we ARE the coin.
I think what you may not understand, and what a lot of other hunters can't fully explain, is the reason WHY we hunt. I can't answer for anyone but myself, but THE main reason why I do it is because it makes me feel one with nature. It's the core of the roots of man. Man has always hunted. We did so for tens of thousands of years before agriculture or the domestication of livestock. Hunting is reality. It's thoroughly clean sustenance. It makes me feel alive and a full participant in our natural world.
It makes me realize that food doesn't come from the grocery store. It comes from mother nature.
And BTW, I AM a natural predator. I was not synthesized. Humans are a natural part of the environment.