Tag Archives: carnivores

Our War on Deer Is a Product of Domestication

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Brace yourself. With autumn comes the early “official” deer kills. They will go on through the winter.

The deer of Valley Forge National Historical Park (photographed in the banner image by Jeff Houdret) are among the communities annually targeted by the United States government.

The vast majority of deer in the Park get shot down again every year. This means very few, if any, deer who stay in the Park will live past age two.

The assault on the deer themselves and on their community’s evolution is grotesque.

Deer Kills Aren’t a “Single Issue”; They’re a Vegan Issue

Deer killing starts because we have created cows, goats, domesticated sheep, domesticated fowl etc. for people to eat and wear, and pets as well. All these animals, human property, must be protected from carnivores and omnivores who run free. (How dare they!)

So we wipe out the wolves and then we establish policies to kill those who rise up to take their place.

Coyotes, in most of the northern Americas.

Then we have “too many deer”? No, we have too few carnivores.

I’m working on a presentation on this connection, tentatively scheduled for Sunday 29 October, at SuTao Cafe in Malvern, PA, to kick off to World Vegan Month in Chester County.

The presentation will be informed by the work of two groups who have directly confronted government assaults on deer: Philadelphia Advocates for the Deer (PAD), and Compassion for Animals – Respect for the Environment (Chester County CARE).

Forced Sterilization of Deer Is Another Insult

Most other deer protection projects have rallied around pharmaceutical control as the “solution to the deer problem” but that answer oppresses and erases deer, just as mass killing does.

And the deer contraception crusade allows the public to retain the idea that animals such as wolves and coyotes have no business living.

Animal liberationists and environmentalists alike should be cultivating human respect for carnivores including coyotes. These beings have roles to play in a balanced bio-community. Our society must stop pretending that managing and micromanaging the balance of nature is humanity’s work.

— Lee.

The Farmer’s Footprint

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Animal farming generally depends on feed crops and wherever crops are grown as feed, pesticides and manure applications are common. What is not absorbed into the crop fields seeps into streams, rivers, and bays – resulting in toxic algal blooms and ever-expanding dead zones that suffocate aquatic animals.

And the human habit of animal husbandry defeats the integrity of animal communities and habitat in other ways as well: because we see animals as rightly appropriated for human food, there’s also the classification of free-living animals as game; there’s our habit of moving various animals between regions (and then adding insult to injury by calling them invasive).

Indeed, animal agribusiness can be understood as a traffic in introduced species.

Read on (article is just below the cover):  Growing Green International No. 35 pages 1, 36.

And, wherever you live on Earth, please consider becoming a member of the Vegan Organic Network.

A Cruelty-Free World?

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Some writers think nature isn’t very nice. David Pearce is one such writer. Pearce told George Dvorsky at the weblog io9 (a daily publication connected with Gawker.com that “covers science, science fiction, and the future”) that re-programming nature so as to eliminate animal habits we don’t like isn’t a new idea: “The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

Conceiving the natural world as pitted against many animals’ interests, Pearce, a utilitarian philosopher, hopes biologists devise ways of reducing suffering in natural habitats as well as in captivity. In “Reprogramming Predators (Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World)” Pearce discusses “the problem of predation” and proposes that predators be eliminated—either by extinction or genetic engineering. Then, Pearce proposes, buffalo and zebras would be managed with contraception technologies in wildlife parks. “On almost every future scenario, we’re destined to play God, says Pearce. “So let’s aim to be compassionate gods and replace the cruelty of Darwinian life with something better.”

Philosophical grandstanding aside, we’re not going to have an Earth devoid of carnivores. They belong to the natural system of trophic cascades that keeps the whole bio-community functioning. Consider that almost all communities of birds feed their hatchlings insects and worms, and the obvious becomes clear. To wipe out natural predation is an impossible dream that would very quickly lend itself to ethical and environmental nightmares.

It’s a fact of life on Earth as well as a strain on the advocate’s emotions that the world’s animals often have short, stressful lives. Tom Regan acknowledges: “When it comes to interspecies relations, nature is red in tooth and claw.” Regan’s Case for Animal Rights firmly states that the rights view does not, however, urge us to control others; instead, it obliges us to let other animals carve out their own destiny. Animal rights does not boil down to pain relief, and the call to control the lions and bobcats from doing what they do to live shows that at the most striking level. We humans can refrain from killing others; and we’ve developed, and can spread, the ethic of non-violence. But forcing other animals, including obligate carnivores, to subscribe to vegetarianism would bring no challenge to our control over other animals; it is, rather, human dominion on overdrive.

REFERENCES
“Reprogramming Predators: Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World” (2009), published on the BLTC [“Better Living Through Chemistry”] Research website, whose mission statement asserts that “Post-Darwinian superminds” can and should abolish pain. David Pearce has assured me, when I wrote previously about this issue for a book, that the website is not meant to be satire.
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), at 357.
Thanks to Bernard Jones for bringing George Dvorsky’s piece to my attention.
Polar Bear Family Group Photo Credit: Susanne Miller/USFWS