There is plenty of information about the importance of hunting and wildlife preservation. Many people think hunting should be banned or restricted more and that the laws aren’t harsh enough on hunting.
Here is information on why this is not true.
Hunting has been a part of human life since the beginning of time. If there is one thing that never changes about us as a species it is that we will always hunt and we search for it because our body was designed for it.
If we are so heavily linked to hunting, then why do some people see it as unethical or wrong?
Farming.
That’s why we’ve grown comforted to not knowing where our food comes from–we go to the store and buy a cow or pig or chicken but never see the animal and how it got here. There is a disconnect between humans and the food they eat. To us it is just food and it is just always there.
Hunting is more than just a hobby–it is a cultural tradition among many families, passed down and deeply routed in our genetics and psychology. Nowadays hunting has gotten less and less popular and deer populations have spiked; while this is not bad, it also brings drawbacks. Reduced hunting pressure allows deer to move more freely, breeding with deer they would never have encountered.
Mass movement and breeding has started spreading a disease among the deer populations called chronic wasting disease or CWD. This disease can be called the zombie disease because what it does to the animal it is affecting. It destroys motor functions and slowly breaks down the animal’s body, Its mortality rate is 100% so there is no chance of recovering from it. The best thing to happen is the animal dies before it spreads to others.
Currently humans cannot contract this. Hunting used to make it harder for this to spread as hunting pressure isolated infected groups and kept them from contaminating other herds.
Hunting programs have come a long way and fund their own wildlife preservation programs with money collected throughout the year. It’s important to manage these things and the decline in hunters is lost revenue for wildlife programs. Overpopulation and mass migration have destroyed ecosystems as large quantity of animals throw off the balance if not corrected. Deer have been known to eat crops and clear fields by stealing food from the local animals.
You shouldn’t look at hunting as just killing because that’s not what it is; it’s a natural part of the world that all animals are apart of as prey or predator even humans fall into prey or predator. We are never truly able to separate from this no matter how hard we try. As long as there are wild animals, there will be a food chain with a place on it for all of us.
Its important to understand our role in taking care of our world and the many different ways to do it. Not all must participate but it is good to consider what could be done and what can happen with change.
