Wife Clubs Mtn. Lion, Saves Husband

[azbackpackr]

Looks like we posted at the same time.

No, it's a lot more than a sport. And what about the animals? Certain species, if you leave them alone they will over-populate.

Also if you leave hunters out of the conservation equation then you create very bad polarization. I say, invite them into the fold of tree-huggers, they have a lot to offer, including a lot of money to spend on habitat restoration.

The current political climate is toward more polarization. Nothing will ever get accomplished this way. People need to work together.

[threedogz]

[azbackpackr]

I understand what you're saying, and especially agree with too many people. (Part of that problem is HOW we live not so much THAT we live.) I'm not asking you to BECOME a hunter, just to understand that hunters do contribute something to conservation. To also try to understand why they enjoy hunting, and try to understand something about them. And I don't think a single one of them is hunting because there are "too many" elk or whatever. (Whether there are too many can be studied and debated by scientists such as wildlife biologists.)

What you're not hearing is that money from hunters is what is paying for most of the habitat conservation and habitat rehabilitation. Hunters' interests alone account for the fact that the Midwest flyway is once again full of millions of ducks, geese and other birds, which had suffered a devastating decline some years ago. Efforts by various states' game depts. and organizations of hunters such as Ducks Unlimited have brought the numbers back up. One thing they did was convince farmers to not fill in ponds, and to provide money for them to not fill in ponds where birds would land while migrating.

Money from hunters is a big reason for the continued effort in the White Mountains to purchase wildlife areas by the Game and Fish Dept, which owns at least five such areas within 10 miles of my house. Game and Fish Dept. is not supported by taxes but by hunting & fishing licenses, lottery money and some grants. Game and Fish Dept. also was a large part of our successful effort to protect 2500 acres of state land from private purchase by a developer along the Little Colorado River on the outskirts of town. (The George Johnson issue, discussed elsewhere.)

Anyway, habitat rehab and protection needs help from everyone who has an interest. Let's not marginalize hunting, or hunters, let's not demonize them--they are not the bad guys. Let's all work together to help conserve the places where wild animals live.

[BoyNhisDog]

I just want to say that I am very impressed with the woman in that story, very, very impressed.

Our makeup and impact on this small planet will always be of wonderment and contention to us.

Only scattered pockets of hunting man survive. Yet the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent avocation of man. It has dominated human evolution, and it enabled man to colonize the earth. Agriculture, on the other hand, has influenced less than 1% of human history.
-- Robert Leo Smith, Biology and Field Ecology


That is something that we find hard to escape but;

10,500 years ago some of the people colonizing the Americas were already in sight of Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. At that time there may have been as many as 6,000 Paleo-Indians scattered over the new world with a density of one per square mile at the front of the line, the maximum density for a hunter-gatherer population. -- a passage researched and related by Alex Shoumatoff in Legends of the American Desert

When that happens/happened, a new way of life is forced and that new way is agriculture. Today's population would not be here without it but hunting is still in our makeup. That is what you call a conundrum.

But still, that aside, Woman who Stands up to Lion is a magnificent and rare creature is she not.
_________________
Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys
- Andre Gide

[azbackpackr]

Oh yes. And I like the word conundrum!

[ck1]

Here's the thing I always notice....

....we worry about animal "overpopulation" and one of the ways animal population is controlled is thru hunting.....

....but is it the animals that are "overpopulating" or is it the people?

...this coming from a guy with a 2.5 year old and another on the way..
_________________
-Colin

"The Journey is the Destination"

[Tom Treks]

[azbackpackr]

Yeah, well, I dunno. Cannibalism just has never been my thing, for some reason.

[Suz]

[BoyNhisDog]

Of course there are too many people. Yes that is cause of many things. There will come a real tipping point one fine day.

You just can't change some things. Just like you can feed people all the corn and beans they want every day and they still have the hunting instinct, you can feed those big cats all the Purina they can hold every single day and they will hunt. Everything follows ancient rhythms. Many people find alternate pursuits to fill that hunting response. The cats cannot. If we never learned to grow things to eat, most of us would not be here. Then we invented things that make it very easy to knock the life out of every living thing on this earth such as the vast herds of migrating animals such as buffalo and pronghorn antelope that used to exist in very recent times but are no more. No matter, this earth has seen many catastrophic mass extinctions and there will be many more.
_________________
Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys
- Andre Gide

[azbackpackr]

Too bad that Diet for a Small Planet idea never caught on. Not that I can claim to be a practitioner, although I do usually grow a few veggies every year. The idea was that you can grow a lot more food if you are feeding people rather than feeding cows. There's an awful lot of resistance to that idea, however! Most people don't want to give up their steaks and hamburgers.

[BoyNhisDog]

I am not really advocating one thing or another, just observing the way things are now. I am a country boy who has lived in a big city for many years now. My first job was on farms when I was underage. I learned when I was 12 years old that it is far easier to pull a trigger than to dispatch an animal with a blade or a club. When you slaughter a hog on the farm, first it is stunned but it must remain alive. Then they put a blade in your hand and the idea is to cut the carotid and bleed it out. There is a lot of cutting on a hog farm. Once day my job was to castrate 80 hogs. With 12 to 14 hours of work a day, you just try to get through it the best way you can. I am not a vegetarian but I eat far more seafood than meat anymore. I have not killed my own food in many years and frankly, I do not miss it at all. I never did like the killing. I would not think twice about defending against attack though. I do not really fault that cat in any way but on the other hand if it is that cat or someone I love, the cat is going down. Ancient rhythms. We are what we are and it is as well.
_________________
Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys
- Andre Gide

[Davis2001R6]

[ck1]

Thanks guys...we're pretty excited...
_________________
-Colin

"The Journey is the Destination"