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clarifying my post
Posted by bushrat on Dec 07 2005
Mike,
I was purposely a bit tongue-in-cheek, so forgive me. Part of what I posted was taken verbatim from an essay on predator control. Actually, the amount of weight(meat, bone, hide, viscera) left behind by hunters is much more than half the on-the-hoof weight of the animals they harvest.
Some of what game meat that is taken from the field by hunters goes into dumpsters in the villages and towns. Legally. A lot (non-res specifically)goes to the food bank. Legally. The commercial butchers who deal with game meat tell me (and we need to seriously look into this) that they often get meat that is spoiled, maggoty, or otherwise in need of heavy trimming or just-plain not fit for human consumption. This is more prevalent (they tell me) among food-bank "donations" and I'll let others draw conclusions on why that may be. The butchers rarely (and aren't required to) inform wildlife enforcement officers...there is a big loophole here that I would like to close. This is a big wanton waste concern of mine, yours, and a lot of other folks.
As to your wanting to better understand the possible repercussions/impacts of physically removing part of the edible portions of an animal from the ecosystem, I can't shed any light on that. Kelly Smith brought up some good points. Many hunters of the past were nomadic. They removed animals from the system, stayed a while to deposit their own human excrement, but moved on. Many of these hunters utilized just about every part of the animal as well and left little for the scavengers and predators. In some cases they purposely left something behind as a sign of respect and gratitude. The moose-meat cysts we commonly see in meat are a product of the wolf-moose interrelationship; wolves develop this parasite, and then deposit it on bushes and such when they defecate. The moose then get it by eating said bushes. It develops in the muscle tissue of moose as harmless cysts but the cycle renews again when wolves (or dogs) eat the raw moose meat. Bears spread seeds in their feces. So can humans. I think maybe this kind of thing is what you are hinting at as an impact of removing the meat from the system but not living within the same system.
Back to my first post on this: Biological Sense---when I said that I thought wolves and bears and other animals were becoming habituated to human-killed carcasses, I want to stress that I didn't mean they hear a gunshot and run to the area (though I bet this is entirely plausible in some cases) but that they are habituated to finding carcasses in certain areas, particularly on or near riparian zones of watercourses or along trails used by hunters. According to one biologist, "wolves are able to kill only about 10-percent of the moose they encounter" (Van Ballenberghe---IN THE COMPANY OF MOOSE, page 30). If we have nearly 7,000 moose carcasses in the field every year, with less than half of the on-the-hoof weight taken, again, this is simply a lot of food for the wolves, and I think all of us know they scavenge these carcasses (indeed, guides and some hunters with time "set up" on carcasses and use them as bait in hopes of killing a wolf---or a bear). I've often wondered what the impacts of human hunting of moose are as far as allowing wolves to prosper. Certainly their chances are greater than 10%, as far as "killing" a moose, when they come upon human-killed moose carcasses. The moose is already down, just waiting to be consumed. In this way I think we unknowingly support many wolves. It's a bit of irony I find particularly interesting.
Best, Mark
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