A trio of fishermen have saved almost 40 dogs that were close to drowning on a Mississippi lake. The hound dogs plunged into the water while chasing a deer after setting off on a fox hunt.
I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.
But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.
There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs
There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.
I have a vegan colleague who would argue while laughing that it applies, although not on the way you thing.
“Look at how humans treat each other, with cruelty, disdain, and little empathy. That is the humain/humane way we treat animals.”
It gets even more complicated. Deer for instance, cause some property damage, sure but nothing like hogs obviously. HOWEVER, if there are to many, they’ll eat up all sorts of plants all winter that other animals and insects depend on in the spring. When state environmental authorities set bag limits, it’s not only to preserve a species, they’re also depending on hunters to remove a certain amount.
Snow geese were a huge problem for a while because they’d migrate far up north, and spend all summer picking apart vegetation on small islands. Vegititaiton that takes forever to grow up there, and was important to making sure some of those islands didn’t erode away… which they did. So near me while the daily bag limit for most birds was 2/day, for those snow geese it was like 25, with no limit on the season.
A good portion of what drives this are things like urban sprawl, etc, but there is no way to remove ourselves from the environment, which means we should do your best to maintain it. Most of these limits and programs are set by highly dedicated people who usually have advanced degrees in a field that pays very poorly. They do it because they care, so I tend to trust them.
I get hunting is unpalatable to a lot of people, but predation is an important part of how ecosystems balance. Left to their own devices these things certainly would stabilize, but the “new normal” may not be pleasant. Those plants excess deer population decimate over the winter may be important to an insect population, which is an important food source for a specific bird during it’s migration, that is important to balancing a beetle that decimates a specific tree species later in that birds migratory path or something. So that deer population becomes important to several other species and ecosystems across a broad range.
I’m not really qualified to talk about specifics, but it was really eye opening talking to an ornithologist friend of mine.
edit: another for instance on deer: When tag limits are placed, you usually get something like 2 bucks and maybe 8 does or something (depending on region, what the environmental authority saw doing surveys etc). This isn’t just to preserve bucks, it’s also that environmentally, it’s important to remove more does. Again my point being these hunting limits aren’t just permission to a hunt a species, but a request that a species is hunted.
There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.
The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.
Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.
And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)
The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)
And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.
I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)
We should stop using dogs to hunt. Hunting is recreation not necessity for the majority of us.
I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.
But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.
There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs
There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.
I don’t think “humanely” can be used in that context
I have a vegan colleague who would argue while laughing that it applies, although not on the way you thing. “Look at how humans treat each other, with cruelty, disdain, and little empathy. That is the humain/humane way we treat animals.”
It gets even more complicated. Deer for instance, cause some property damage, sure but nothing like hogs obviously. HOWEVER, if there are to many, they’ll eat up all sorts of plants all winter that other animals and insects depend on in the spring. When state environmental authorities set bag limits, it’s not only to preserve a species, they’re also depending on hunters to remove a certain amount.
Snow geese were a huge problem for a while because they’d migrate far up north, and spend all summer picking apart vegetation on small islands. Vegititaiton that takes forever to grow up there, and was important to making sure some of those islands didn’t erode away… which they did. So near me while the daily bag limit for most birds was 2/day, for those snow geese it was like 25, with no limit on the season.
A good portion of what drives this are things like urban sprawl, etc, but there is no way to remove ourselves from the environment, which means we should do your best to maintain it. Most of these limits and programs are set by highly dedicated people who usually have advanced degrees in a field that pays very poorly. They do it because they care, so I tend to trust them.
I get hunting is unpalatable to a lot of people, but predation is an important part of how ecosystems balance. Left to their own devices these things certainly would stabilize, but the “new normal” may not be pleasant. Those plants excess deer population decimate over the winter may be important to an insect population, which is an important food source for a specific bird during it’s migration, that is important to balancing a beetle that decimates a specific tree species later in that birds migratory path or something. So that deer population becomes important to several other species and ecosystems across a broad range.
I’m not really qualified to talk about specifics, but it was really eye opening talking to an ornithologist friend of mine.
edit: another for instance on deer: When tag limits are placed, you usually get something like 2 bucks and maybe 8 does or something (depending on region, what the environmental authority saw doing surveys etc). This isn’t just to preserve bucks, it’s also that environmentally, it’s important to remove more does. Again my point being these hunting limits aren’t just permission to a hunt a species, but a request that a species is hunted.
There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.
The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.
Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.
And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)
The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)
And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.
I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)