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Hunting, Meat Salvage, Ethics
Posted by Kelly Smith on Dec 07 2005
Good topics for thought and discussion don't always get much of a response. Good job, Mike in presenting it in a way that tickles the keypads of folks out there.
There are many branches of this whole topic; I'll try to address just a couple. As environmentalist (and hunter) Ed Abbey said: “Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about. Such a storm of conflicting emotions!”
I view hunting as a participatory, rather than observational, activity that affects the animals and their environment. Pretty much every activity could be looked at that way, but the fact that we try to find an animal, kill it, and take it home makes it different from bird watching or hiking or what have you. We participate in nature as a predator.
Although it's easy to see that we affect game animals and their environment, it's not so easy to determine all the effects we have. As others have pointed out, we leave varying amounts of nutrients behind that are used by other predators, scavengers, plants, and soil. Other predators do that too--a grizzly or wolf kill also feeds other critters. What's different, perhaps, about us is that we take our food (and hide and antlers, etc.) away from that immediate environment, and we make no "deposits" after we leave. The bear, on the other hand, does shit in the woods.
To my way of thinking, the ideal would be to live where you hunt. That would minimize adverse effects to the environment--little if any fossil-fuel use to get there and back, any and all waste (including human waste) left for other critters. Of course, that's not feasible for most of us. We do use a lot of energy to get there and we do take the animal from its environment.
The reason I feel OK about this is that we have the ability to take care of the environment in ways that the critters don't. I can contribute to conservation groups and participate in projects here in Oregon, and I can also contribute to groups that try to protect Alaska. And I do. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize our adverse impacts, but at least we have ways of mitigating those impacts. And I believe the net results are positive, because most of us contribute in some way and we try to control or eliminate the bad actors who call themselves hunters.
As to laws of meat salvage, I think they are necessary. While they don't affect most of us most of the time, they do minimize incentive for some folks to do great damage (poaching, commercialization of wildlife). I believe that it's ultimately a bad thing any time you can make money from selling wildlife or their parts. Financial incentive makes people do things they would otherwise know are wrong. We don't have the buffalo hunters anymore, or the punt guns that folks used to kill thousands of waterfowl with, but we would if they weren't illegal. Commercialization of wildlife would make for another interesting thread sometime...
Happy holidays.
Previous: same thoughts.. jpost Dec 07 2005
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