Tag Archives: sustainable

Hunting is Hardly Sustainable

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There aren’t all that many deer around here, but you wouldn’t know it by the number of rigs full of hunters driving up and down the roads lately. Due to several factors—poaching, for one, along with a healthy population of natural predators, and the fact that thick evergreen forests don’t provide much to browse on—deer are far from common in these parts.

It seems hunters are the overpopulated ones. For every little deer there must be a dozen Elmers out for a drive-by drool. Often you see 3 of them packing the front seat of a pickup; but they’re there for the party atmosphere, not to conserve on fuel. The first weekend of hunting season is a lot like opening day at some popular fishing hole. But instead of boats full of fishermen tangling each other’s lines on a crowded lake, hunters troll back and forth on the roads, competing for that one “trophy” buck out there.

I often wonder if anyone has done a survey of just how much money is spent, and gallons of fuel burned, by the average hunter as compared to their success rate and the amount of food procured. According to their apologists, hunters in the U.S. spend $24.7 billion annually on their sport, including the cost of guns and ammo, travel, gas, food and drink, supplies, vehicles, leases, lodging, and guide services.

Meanwhile, the cost to society in dealing with the psychopathic behavior hunting encourages and enables is immeasurable.

I know one thing: it would be far more cost effective for them to get their protein from grains, like wheat or rice and legumes like beans or lentils. When it comes right down to it, hunting for subsistence can hardly be considered sustainable.

 

The Day Seven Billion People Decided to Hunt Their Own Dinner

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It’s dawn, July 12th, 2012, the day that nearly all 7 billion of the Earth’s human inhabitants decide to start killing wild animals for their dinner. (To be exact, the human population is actually 7,025,629,572, according to the current population clock…but who’s counting?)

All at once the teeming, unnaturally overcrowded human population leaves the congested towns and cities—fully armed—to take to the fields and forests in search of the last vestiges of wildlife out there. For many, the only animals besides pets they’ve ever seen are the ones that come sautéed, grilled, fried or fricasseed, but hunter propagandists have convinced them that they’ll be better environmentalists if they join the war on wildlife. Some are surprised at how easy thier devolution back to the savagery of hunting is for them.

It doesn’t matter if an animal is considered big “game” or “vermin,” protected or prosperous, not a single non-human is safe from Homo sapiens’ new-found devotion to their old ways. The first to get hunted to extinction are the critically endangered species, like the white-tailed prairie dog, the black-footed ferret and the California condor in the U.S., the Panda in China or the Okapi in Africa…

By noon, only a fraction of the seven billion have made their own kills, and the per-person success rate is already dropping. Instead of each new hunter killing their own wild animal, people start teaming up and sharing their kills, yet there still just isn’t enough wildlife left to go around. Naturally, they begin to turn their weapons on one another…

The authors of those trendy new pro-hunting books that extoll the virtues of killing wild animals for dinner—finally seeing the error in their ways—try in vain to call off the seven billion new super-predators, telling them, “We didn’t mean for all of you to start hunting, just a select, entitled few!”

(Upwards of 60 billion factory-farmed animals are killed across the globe annually, including 10 billion in the US alone, to appease hedonistic human carnivores. How far could anyone expect the Earth’s few remaining wildlife populations to go in feeding each and every obdurate meat-eating human?)

By the end of the day, the bloodlust is satiated, but the Earth is virtually a lifeless wasteland; every animal species has been hunted practically to extinction. Only now do the masses look around for a fresh, new answer. They’re ready to listen to a vision for a truly sustainable future that doesn’t involve killing animals for their dinner.

A vaguely familiar message comes from the few people who did not take part in the days’ killing spree. Their two-word slogan may not have sounded appealing to the masses before, but now people are willing to take the path of peace—to lay down their weapons and live a less destructive life.

Ultimately, this story has a happy ending: The Day the Human Race Went Vegan