| Why is hunting a good thing? |
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| A Case for Hunting - Scientific, Economic and Ethical Reasons in Support of Sport Hunting Submitted by: Brad Blaine I have long been an admirer of nature. Having lived on my family's farm for the majority of my life, I have come to respect and understand a great deal about the outdoors. Admittedly, most of this has come through both my education as a biologist and hunting. I have learned a lot of things about nature through hunting and was only able to explain them more thoroughly through my college education. What I find almost laughable is the notion that sport hunting is an evil, cruel and undesirable thing. It is my intent to help dispell these poorly founded notions through scientific, economic and ethical reasonining. Scientific Reasons for Sport Hunting I think the best way to start out our discussion about hunting is by putting ourselves in our place. By this I mean how we as a species fit into the larger picture of the ecosystem and Earth's history. The Earth is over 4.6 billion years old. Modern man, however, has only been on earth for 1.5 million years. In other words, mankind is the new species on the block. This is scientific fact and not up for discussion by religious beliefs that put the Earth only on the scale of thousands of years. For most of us, these numbers are hard to comprehend. How many millions of people do you meet a day? Or, how many million e-mails do you send out a week? These numbers are hard to comprehend in our day-to-day living. As such, let's convert this into something we are a little more familiar with - a monthly calendar. We can all relate to minutes, hours, days and weeks. One mathematician put the entire history of the Earth onto a month calendar. Included in this, is the time that man has existed on the Earth. Hold onto your seats because this may shock you. By converting the Earth's history into a month calendar, mankind has existed less than the last minute of the last hour of the last day! Damn! Now that puts things into perspective and puts us in our place. If you were the Earth watching all the things that have happened on your face, you would see the human race as just another bug, even though this one is doing some new stuff unlike any of the others previously. Armed with this knowledge, what gives us the ability to make such judgement calls about nature? Case in point, how can we say that hunting is bad, cruel or against nature? This is more of an ethical question than a scientific one. The ethics we'll discuss in a later section, though the scientific answer is we don't have data to suggest that sport hunting is against nature. Quite the contrary as we'll see! |
| The next thing we should scientifically consider in support of hunting is likewise related to our very existence - our physiology. Man has evolved to his current status only through hunting. STOP! To give you a whirlwind tour of man's evolution through hunting, I must first, and sadly, discuss evolution itself. Many religions discount evolution and I am personally tired of defending it yet again, but in order for you to understand, I must. To do this I'll first ask you what your definition of evolution is. Go ahead, take a moment and write down or otherwise compose your definition of evolution. . . Now, I'll give you the scientific definition of evolution. Evolution is the change in an allele frequency of a given population. Whoah! What am I talking about? Let me break this down for you word by word. Change is just that, an increase or decrease in number. An allele is a genetic trait, that in turn determines what a living thing "looks" like physically. A gene or group of genes determine such things as eye color, height, hair color and so on. Frequency is how often someting occurs. For example, in this definition, if you have 6 out of 12 people with blue eyes, you could say that the allele frequency for this "population" is 50 percent. A population is all the individuals of a species that live in a certain area. For example, the population of Point Pleasant is approximatley 18,000 people. So, putting all these things together we can translate our definition of evolution into something long and lengthy like "the increase or decrease in number of genetically determined physical traits for all the members of a given species within a certain area." The classic example of evolution is the pepper moth. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, smog and dust covered a lot of vegetation surrounding the many factories. As such, this created a new contrasting surface for the pepper moth (a solid white moth) to sleep on during daylight hours. Birds and other predators were able to pick out the moths very easily except for those that were spotted (or peppered). These moths were camoflaged much better than their solid white relatives. Over time, the solid white moths weren't able to make little baby moths - Why? The reason is because there weren't any around! They had all been eaten by predators! By contrast, the camoflaged moths were left to do all the breeding thus creating more camoflaged moths than solid white moths. Over time, this caused the pepper moth to change as a species and to become peppered instead of white. Why some moths were peppered and some were white to begin with is something you'll have to ask me personally as we'll not discuss it here. |
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