A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore
The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:
We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.
It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.
An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.
I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.
Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”
As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species
I do think for a lot of people, the objection is that we cull animals to fix problems we caused. Take for example, the current barred owl vs spotted owl debate thats looking toward a massive barred owl culling
We destroyed the spotted owls habitat (old growth forests) for logging purposes
We are responsible for the climate change that has driven barred owl's migratory patterns west
And now the only way to fix it is to kill thousands of animals who were only trying to adapt and survive. Im not arguing against the solution but it isnt 'icky' it reeks of injustice and hypocrisy
And we do that a lot. The hunting industry is a massive industry that over the past hundred years (even 50 years) taken steps to promote an overpopulation of deer. Now the argument is 'there are too many deer so we have to hunt'. Yeah. You did that.
Also, hunters kill bucks which is significantly less effective for limiting population because one buck can impregnate a lot of does. The dominant theme of hunting is display of masculinity through violence, not conservation.
And im not even fully against hunting, like not even close. I grew up in the country, some of my best friends are hunters. I just want to make sure we're calling a spade a spade
I understand that we have to do what we can now, and that involves strategic culling, but its ok to be upset about that. We should be upset about that. To dismiss real objections to the treatment of living, feeling creatures as 'icky' or 'not cottagecore' is not only demeaning but unproductive.
