Comrade, this is not a good take. First of all, it fails to identify animals as fellow proletariats who are exploited by capital as a source of resource extraction. They are a hyperexploited subclass of lumpenproletariat who are so disenfranchised that they cannot even communicate their rage and refusal of consent to be exploited in human language, effectively rendering them mute.
Moreover, we do not have a deer overpopulation problem, we have a wolf extirpation problem. Looking at a proliferation of deer and concluding that the solution is to cull their numbers through murder is akin to looking at the proliferation of houseless individuals and saying the way to reduce the number of the unhoused is to kill a few in your neighborhood. Like... Yes, it does reduce the number of unhoused, but it also punishes an already devastated class of individuals when they have done nothing whatever to immiserate themselves.
The solution to houselessness is affordable housing programs and seizing any vacant properties and turning them into public housing if left vacant for more than 6 months +1 day. The solution to deer population booms is to fence your hostas and allow the rewilding of rural spaces complete with reintroduction of wolves and other predators.
Then sure, carry a gun in the woods because you don't want to get merc'd by a wolf, but there is no reason for humans to be violently murdering our animal comrades when 100% of human needs can be adequately met from non-animal sources: construction, dietary, textile, etc, especially now that we are in the eve of molecularly precise microbial fermentation and other forms of additive modes of production.
Yeah, or just be practical and follow the advice in the article. If it worked for our ancestors 15+ thousand years ago, and it did so for hundreds of thousands of years before that, then I think it's probably a good plan now.
Also, the solution to houselessness is to give people housing. Done.
Brother, you just restated my point: you don't kill the houseless because of a proliferation of unhoused people, you give them housing.
The only reason you view killing a deer as a practical solution and you DON'T view killing unhoused people as practical is because you hold the erroneous view that the life of a human is more important or that it holds more ethical value than the life of a deer.
Without an appeal to higher powers, what is your material basis for making such a strange conclusion?
And our ancestors for thousands of years shit in holes in the woods and died young from simple bacterial infections. I reckon you don't want to get rid of running water and penicillin (unless you're an Anarcho-Primitivist in which case...I guess kudos for being internally consistent but also bye Gina). "We have some it this way for generations" is a horrible justification for anything. We did despotism and slavery for generations and it was a practical solution for despots and slavers. That alone completely rolls your spurious assertion.
I'm not spoiling for a fight, I get that you want to eat meat and you view animals as less than us and therefore morally don't to slaughter. But that craving for meat is bad for your health and bad for the planet. Turning from mega industrial scale meat production to backyard hunting can work at micro scale, but if we seriously applied this ethic to 330 million Americans, deer would be extinct within a decade. It's foolish.
And if we aren't offering practical solutions that the mass of people can apply to name material improvements in their lives, the fuck are we doing, comrades?
I'm glad you covered the fact that a high deer population makes forest regeneration much harder. We have relatively low deer density where I live in Ohio, probably due to the popularity of hunting here, and we're successfully regenerating old cornfields with very little intervention. I didn't realize how lucky we are until reading in various online groups about the difficulty deer posed to such a project, and the amount of work other people had to do to protect young saplings. All that work makes progress much slower in many cases.
Also I agree about the macho bullshit of trophy hunting being true most of the time. However, getting to know the methods of some local hunters changed my mind slightly. They hunt where they live, kill does for meat, and shoot bucks that they have come to know personally by observation over several years. They still get the thrill and status of the big rack, but only kill bucks who are getting up in age and will decline soon. This is a different situation from the usual scenario of traveling to hunt and wandering around looking for the biggest buck to shoot before someone else gets him.
As a vegan I would no more shoot a deer than I would buy a MacDonald's rain forest destroying burger. Nonetheless, I live among meat eaters of every sort - just as I am an atheist relating respectfully to all manner of church going folks. For some people hunting may be a needed way to survive, but not for the vast majority of hunters who tellingly refer to killing wildlife as "sport."
Hunting is also a dress rehearsal for war and the slaughter of animals by any means fits into our human centered, ecocidal history - an environmental Machiavellian mindset that subordinates empathy to power. I'd prefer not to meet my end in the jaws of a crocodile or shark, and can therefore imagine that deer feel the same terror that I experience. If a deer sees me on a trail somewhere, she has nothing to worry about.
Comrade, this is not a good take. First of all, it fails to identify animals as fellow proletariats who are exploited by capital as a source of resource extraction. They are a hyperexploited subclass of lumpenproletariat who are so disenfranchised that they cannot even communicate their rage and refusal of consent to be exploited in human language, effectively rendering them mute.
Moreover, we do not have a deer overpopulation problem, we have a wolf extirpation problem. Looking at a proliferation of deer and concluding that the solution is to cull their numbers through murder is akin to looking at the proliferation of houseless individuals and saying the way to reduce the number of the unhoused is to kill a few in your neighborhood. Like... Yes, it does reduce the number of unhoused, but it also punishes an already devastated class of individuals when they have done nothing whatever to immiserate themselves.
The solution to houselessness is affordable housing programs and seizing any vacant properties and turning them into public housing if left vacant for more than 6 months +1 day. The solution to deer population booms is to fence your hostas and allow the rewilding of rural spaces complete with reintroduction of wolves and other predators.
Then sure, carry a gun in the woods because you don't want to get merc'd by a wolf, but there is no reason for humans to be violently murdering our animal comrades when 100% of human needs can be adequately met from non-animal sources: construction, dietary, textile, etc, especially now that we are in the eve of molecularly precise microbial fermentation and other forms of additive modes of production.
Yeah, or just be practical and follow the advice in the article. If it worked for our ancestors 15+ thousand years ago, and it did so for hundreds of thousands of years before that, then I think it's probably a good plan now.
Also, the solution to houselessness is to give people housing. Done.
Brother, you just restated my point: you don't kill the houseless because of a proliferation of unhoused people, you give them housing.
The only reason you view killing a deer as a practical solution and you DON'T view killing unhoused people as practical is because you hold the erroneous view that the life of a human is more important or that it holds more ethical value than the life of a deer.
Without an appeal to higher powers, what is your material basis for making such a strange conclusion?
And our ancestors for thousands of years shit in holes in the woods and died young from simple bacterial infections. I reckon you don't want to get rid of running water and penicillin (unless you're an Anarcho-Primitivist in which case...I guess kudos for being internally consistent but also bye Gina). "We have some it this way for generations" is a horrible justification for anything. We did despotism and slavery for generations and it was a practical solution for despots and slavers. That alone completely rolls your spurious assertion.
I'm not spoiling for a fight, I get that you want to eat meat and you view animals as less than us and therefore morally don't to slaughter. But that craving for meat is bad for your health and bad for the planet. Turning from mega industrial scale meat production to backyard hunting can work at micro scale, but if we seriously applied this ethic to 330 million Americans, deer would be extinct within a decade. It's foolish.
And if we aren't offering practical solutions that the mass of people can apply to name material improvements in their lives, the fuck are we doing, comrades?
Actually, I don't view a human life as superior to a deer. Make of that what you will. Good day.
I'm glad you covered the fact that a high deer population makes forest regeneration much harder. We have relatively low deer density where I live in Ohio, probably due to the popularity of hunting here, and we're successfully regenerating old cornfields with very little intervention. I didn't realize how lucky we are until reading in various online groups about the difficulty deer posed to such a project, and the amount of work other people had to do to protect young saplings. All that work makes progress much slower in many cases.
Also I agree about the macho bullshit of trophy hunting being true most of the time. However, getting to know the methods of some local hunters changed my mind slightly. They hunt where they live, kill does for meat, and shoot bucks that they have come to know personally by observation over several years. They still get the thrill and status of the big rack, but only kill bucks who are getting up in age and will decline soon. This is a different situation from the usual scenario of traveling to hunt and wandering around looking for the biggest buck to shoot before someone else gets him.
As a vegan I would no more shoot a deer than I would buy a MacDonald's rain forest destroying burger. Nonetheless, I live among meat eaters of every sort - just as I am an atheist relating respectfully to all manner of church going folks. For some people hunting may be a needed way to survive, but not for the vast majority of hunters who tellingly refer to killing wildlife as "sport."
Hunting is also a dress rehearsal for war and the slaughter of animals by any means fits into our human centered, ecocidal history - an environmental Machiavellian mindset that subordinates empathy to power. I'd prefer not to meet my end in the jaws of a crocodile or shark, and can therefore imagine that deer feel the same terror that I experience. If a deer sees me on a trail somewhere, she has nothing to worry about.
Which part, the macho bullshit part or the fact that hunting bucks doesn’t reduce the deer population?