Nah. It’s much more humane to kill and eat an animal that has lived its life free than to buy one that has been raised on a factory farm.
ETA–And by the way, the idea that hunters keep the population in control is not just BS. When I lived in Virginia, they practically had to beg hunters to take extra permits some years b/c the deer population was getting out of hand. I helped do my part one year, using the grill of my sister’s car. She wasn’t happy.
Wow. I was so totally unaware of any difference between wild animals and domesticated ones. Thanks for pointing that out. :rolleyes:
Your point was that albinism == very sick, not just evolutionary disadvantage. Unless you define any creature with any evolutionary disadvantage as necessarily being very sick, I think you’re wrong.
Humans hunting animals for food IS letting nature sort it out.
If you say so. But if that’s the case, then why is it considered bad to shoot fawns?
I never knew hunters were such big fans of Darwin!
I’m not aware of too many human endevors besides perhaps eating fertilized chicken eggs and veal where it’s acceptible to kill the young for food.
Yes, some mutations are an advantage. This one wasn’t. You know how we know? The fucking thing is dead, that’s how. We don’t really need to “stipulate” the patently obvious: having stark white fur in a non-arctic enviroment is not exactly what one would call an “advantage.”
Of course they’re celebrating an unusual kill. Why wouldn’t they? As a general rule, people don’t get hugely excited by mediocrity. This is bad when the kill is rare because the entire species is endangered. But deer aren’t endangered, and eliminating albinism is something that’s beneficial to the species as a whole. Is it a post-hoc rationalization? Maybe, but who gives a fuck? The practical effect is that a defective genome has been removed from the local deer population. This is a good thing, period.
Nature did sort it out, when the hunter got the deer in her sights and pulled the trigger.
Yeah, but the difference there is, fauns grow up. The baby deer that doesn’t get shot today is tomorrows healthy buck with several successful mating seasons under its belt. If you kill all the baby deer, you don’t have any more deer at all. If you kill all the albino deer, you don’t have any… albino deer. Which, again, is good for the deer population as a whole.
Glad I could help. Fighting ignorance is what the board’s all about, after all.
Exactly. And yet animals in the wild have no such compunction. So if hunting is the same as letting nature sort things out, why don’t wolves go after the biggest and strongest animals and avoid the easy kills?
Horseshit. Many if not most leases practice a well-researched, scientific game management program. The land’s ability to properly sustain a certain number is determined, with emphasis placed on gender, sexual maturity, etc. The number in each class that, when harvested, would best ensure continued health and propogation of the herd are determined and to the best of the manager’s/hunter’s abilities this is carried out. Deviations from that schedule are fed into the next year’s overall program, adjusting the optimal crop up or down accordingly.
This and the fact the best bucks are often the wiliest ensure continued herd health, appropriate diversity and breeding success.
Hardly any meat on a fawn.
Last time I checked, it does sometimes snow in Minnesota. Interesting logic, there, too: if you can kill it, any abnormality it had was clearly an evolutionary disadvantage. Do you hunt witches in your spare time, too?
You really want to go down the road of “it’s obviously worth celebrating if people get excited about it”?
Because the wolves survival depends on expending the least amount of time and engergy to insure the continuation of the species I’d have no problem with someone who had no other foodsources taking a fawn.
I do think that you have some sort of disconnect where you don’t equate “humans” to “natural” however. This seems to be a common issue in the Bunny Hugger community at large.
Is your argument that, because humans can understand and have developed concepts like conservation, animal husbandry, wildlife management, and ethics, that we are not part of nature?
Not that I agree with the Op, but I disagree with you as much. You are not a biologist, you are not a zoologist, and you are not fighting ignorance but instead braying that what you believe is correct without any proof or knowledge.
Here is a counter to your brilliant argument:
Now of course, anyone with even a basic understanding of biology and evolution will understand that throughout history, being white (year round) in a non-arctic environment was not a helpful survival trait. How does that directly relate to the Op anyway?
Jim
Killing an albino deer is a pretty mediocre accomplishment if you think about it. Unless you’re hunting in a blizzard.
Well, if a particular trait (say, magnificent antlers) attracts hunters, then it *is * disadvantageous from an evolutionary standpoint. I have read, for example, that African elephants are evolving shorter tusks because of ivory poachers. Bigger and stronger != better or evolutionarily advantageous.
And I don’t hunt people because it is immoral. If you think it is also immoral to kill animals, well, that’s a different thread which is not specific to hunting.
Buying a hunk of beef in the supermarket is an even less impressive accomplishment.
No, that’s not my argument. It’s not that those things place humanity outside of nature, but I think it’s avoiding the obvious to ignore the fact that humanity’s capabilities allow us play by decidedly different rules than every other animal in the natural world. And notice you only mention the good things…you didn’t mention pollution, destruction of habitat, which are also things that clearly make humans an exceptional case in terms of species. I don’t see it as a black-and-white thing. And no, I don’t think hunting with a bow and arrow makes you any more natural than hunting with a rifle. But as humans, we clearly place value on things for which nature has seemingly very little regard. It doesn’t place us outside of nature, but it does make us different than nearly every other being in nature. Would you disagree with that?
Of course, I agree with that. But I don’t take a leap from there to say that hunting is wrong. When you mention bad effects humans have on nature, such as pollution and destruction of habitat, I’d imagine there are a whole host of human activities that affect nature more negatively than hunting.
I must have missed where someone suggested this was even an accomplishment, let alone a non-mediocre one.