Deer and geese also wreak havoc on the heavily modified habitat of suburban back yards, parks, and natural or man-made ponds. For our part, we have to contend with the risks of collision, too. Deer have brought tick-borne diseases to even the closely cropped suburban yard. In some areas with large deer populations, some residents have contracted Lyme disease several times.
Parks, playgrounds, and golf courses covered in goose excrement make it all but impossible to enjoy these amenities. Indeed, in a sense it advances domestication. In the long run, we will have to figure out ways of making human settlements less inviting to wildlife, and we must do more than we have done to date to expand good habitats for wildlife that are a reasonable distance from population centers.
Hunters have been a major force in preserving and maintaining habitats for wildlife. Organizations like Ducks Unlimited have protected thousands of acres of breeding habitat for waterfowl which is also important for many non-game species.
The purchase of hunting and fishing licenses has supported the work of state wildlife and fisheries agencies. Over the course of the last one hundred years, these agencies have developed scientifically based wildlife and habitat management policies that are responsible for the quite remarkable recovery of a wide range of species, game and non-game.
Wild turkeys, absent from much of their former range for over a hundred years, are now solidly established. In the s, a small tax was levied on all guns and ammunition and later expanded to include fishing gear and fishing and hunting-related accessories. This revenue enabled the U. The stamp is required of all hunters of waterfowl. Finally, many states have added a small fee on top of the fishing and hunting license fee in order to fund land acquisition to enhance conservation and hunting opportunities.
All this is commendable but it has not been enough. There are not enough hunters to fund what needs to be done to address the looming conflicts between humans and at least some species of wildlife. A shift in the way we think about wildlife and habitat is clearly in order. We need to be prepared to keep wild animals wild, and this means hunting them when and where it is appropriate. And it means a willingness to put resources into land acquisition for the purpose of creating ample habitat for wildlife.
Collectively, hunters have set an example of supporting enlightened ecological management, and this example is renewed each time a hunter buys a license, purchases a gun, or renews membership in one of the many organizations that promote conservation. If only the general population could begin to appreciate the value of investing in habitat and supporting the active management of those habitats to keep them capable of supporting stable wildlife populations.
This brings us to the third reason why hunting is important. Just as it is important to keep wildlife wild for its own sake, it is also important to keep it wild for our sake. Without a clear distinction between wild and tame and between humans and wildlife, we would quickly lose our bearings. But eliding the differences between the wild and the civilized as some animal advocates urge will not usher in an age of comity between humans any more than it will usher in an age of lions and lambs living in harmony.
The wild—the other —is necessary for us to understand our place in the world and our ethical obligation to preserve and protect the wild. Hunting, as Florence Shepard reminds us, compels us to acknowledge our participation in the food web. To think that being a vegetarian or vegan removes us from the killing of animals is, as Tovar Cerulli makes abundantly clear, an illusion that conveniently avoids acknowledging the multiple ways we are locked in a struggle with nature, a struggle that has defined and continues to define who we are.
We are not only shaping ourselves, we have had—and continue to have—a huge impact on our environment. Indeed, it could be fairly said that we have won countless battles against nature but we are losing the war.
In our desire to dominate and bend nature to our purposes, we have forgotten our own wildness and our indebtedness to the wild. Hunting stands as a brake against this. As paradoxical as it may seem, over the course of the past century, hunters have collectively embraced an ethic that decidedly emphasizes sustainability. Hunters have supported restraints on the taking of game in order to insure that healthy game populations will be available to generations to come.
Not accidentally, Leopold was an avid hunter. The combination of evidence suggests the animals must have been hunted, not scavenged. In modern-day Africa, scavengers don't eat such animals because their primary predators, such as lions and hyenas, will consume them entirely, leaving nothing behind. The researchers concluded that these skulls were likely scavenged by the ancient hominins.
Even today, the Serengeti is littered with wildebeest-size heads, Ferraro said. The team hypothesized that ancient human ancestors found the discarded heads in their landscape, and then cracked open the skulls to access the fatty, nutritious, energy-rich brains.
That might have fueled the body changes seen later in modern-human ancestors such as Homo erectus. Although researchers aren't exactly sure who these human ancestors were, they certainly walked upright and were adapted to living on the grassland — possibly H.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter tiaghose. Original article on LiveScience. Extreme violence is in our nature, it was argued by fossil experts such as Raymond Dart and writers like Robert Ardrey, whose book African Genesis on the subject was particularly influential. By the 80s, the idea had run out of favour, and scientists argued that our larger brains evolved mainly to help us co-operate with each other.
We developed language and other skills that helped us maintain complex societies. People have dismissed them as mere scavengers and I don't think that looks right any more. In his study, Bunn and his colleagues looked at a huge butchery site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
The carcasses of wildebeest, antelopes and gazelles were brought there by ancient humans, most probably members of the species Homo habilis , more than 1. The meat was then stripped from the animals' bones and eaten. Were they bringing back creatures that were in their prime or were old or young? Then we compared our results with the kinds of animals killed by lions and leopards. The results for several species of large antelope Bunn analysed showed that humans preferred only adult animals in their prime, for example.
Lions and leopards killed old, young and adults indiscriminately. For small antelope species, the picture was slightly different.
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