Death by internet, make it a double.

[johnnylite]

Originally Posted by Kareem Korn

You Kill It..............You Grill It.

I got three packs of coyotes with eight+ confirmed dogs per. I got two owls the size of 6yo kids that have nested in my tree for years, I got coons, hawks, wild dogs. All can cause me problems. All that might be infected with some kind of something or other, all that can (and do) eat cats, dogs, and whatever small animal you choose to keep for that week. I don't need to kill them to keep them at bay. With the coyotes I sometimes have to charge them to remind that I can kill them if I wanted. I choose to live among these animals, so why would I want to kill them? To me, it's better than living among the human animals in the city.

I appreciate locobro's opinion.

That's about the most intelligent post on this thread including mine.

[Fresh One]

Originally Posted by FishStalker

The mountain lion (as well as coyote) 'problem' is because people have been encroaching into more remote areas and forcing the predators into smaller and smaller territories and increasing the likelihood of contact with humans. Add some drought and fires and it's an obvious recipe for disaster when the animals are trying to find food.

Think about it, if you were in the middle of nowhere, hungry and tired and found some easy pickings in the form of some chickens or goats and you killed one to avoid starvation, should we kill YOU?

The "problem" is not human encounters which you seem to allude to, it is lions eating all of the sheep into extinction and crippling the deer herd. Not too many people get killed by lions. More likely to die from a bee sting.

[speedgoat]

Originally Posted by johnnylite69

I ain't your buddy by the way buddy.

You've got that right.

At least there's something we agree on.

[Fresh One]

Originally Posted by Kareem Korn

You Kill It..............You Grill It.

I got three packs of coyotes with eight+ confirmed dogs per. I got two owls the size of 6yo kids that have nested in my tree for years, I got coons, hawks, wild dogs. All can cause me problems. All that might be infected with some kind of something or other, all that can (and do) eat cats, dogs, and whatever small animal you choose to keep for that week. I don't need to kill them to keep them at bay. With the coyotes I sometimes have to charge them to remind that I can kill them if I wanted. I choose to live among these animals, so why would I want to kill them? To me, it's better than living among the human animals in the city.

I appreciate locobro's opinion.

I damn sure agree with your comment about living with human animals in the city. "Animals" is a great description for many of them.

[SNEEKEE]

here is what this hole thread is PRESONLE CODE OF ETHIC'S

[johnnylite]

Originally Posted by SNEEKEE

here is what this hole thread is PRESONLE CODE OF ETHIC'S

O.K. I'm done with the bad day. Sneekee just made me shoot diet coke out my nose.

[johnnylite]

Originally Posted by speedgoat

You've got that right.

At least there's something we agree on.

I think you want to be though.

[SNEEKEE]

Oh it's a right to hunt how ever you want that is legal in your state.If you bitch about the way one guy hunt's and not your own way.That's just amo for the tree hugger's.Like me I dont like hunting over bait but do I sopport it all the way

[Fresh One]

One thing I know, we need more threads like this on BD. Good healthy debate and discussion whether we agree or agree to disagree. I get tired of reading the "Saw a white F-250 on I-15 with a BD sticker" posts.

[Kurt]

This THREAD IS AWESOME

[FishStalker]

Originally Posted by Fresh One

I'm not advocating killing everything that preys on game animals, I'm just saying that everything needs to be managed. Who is going to do that if humans don't?

I'd suggest that humans are ill equipped to make sound decisions when it comes to managing ecosystem as the last century has more than demonstrated.

MichaelCrichton.com | Complexity Theory and Environmental Management

Environmental disputes frequently revolve around conflicts of land use, triggered by a fear. The spotted owl is endangered, and that means that logging in the northwest must stop. People are put out of work, communities suffer. It may be, in ten or thirty years, that we discover logging was not a danger to the spotted owl. Or the issue may remain contentious. My point is that the drama surrounding such disputes—angry marches and press coverage, tree hugging, bulldozers—serves to obscure the deeper problem. We don't know how to manage wilderness environments, even when there is no conflict at all.

To see what I mean, let’s take a case history of our management of the environment: Yellowstone National Park.

Long recognized as a setting of great natural beauty, in 1872 Ulysses Grant set aside Yellowstone as the first formal nature preserve in the world. More than 2 million acres, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. John Muir was pleased when he visited in 1885, noting that under the care of the Department of the Interior, Yellowstone was protected from "the blind, ruthless destruction that is going on in adjoining regions."

Theodore Roosevelt was also pleased in 1903 when as President he went to Yellowstone National Park for a dedication ceremony.

It was his third visit. Roosevelt saw a thousand antelope, plentiful cougar, mountain sheep, deer, coyote, and many thousands of elk. He wrote, "Our people should see to it that this rich heritage is preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with its majestic beauty all unmarred."

But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that "white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone."

What they didn't say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But they thought they knew better. They thought their environmental concerns trumped any mere law.

What actually happened at Yellowstone is a cascade of ego and error. But to understand it, we have to go back to the 1890s. Back then it was believed that elk were becoming extinct, and so these animals were fed and encouraged. Over the next few years the numbers of elk in the park exploded. Roosevelt had seen a few thousand animals, and noted they were more numerous than on his last visit.

By 1912, there were 30,000. By 1914, 35,000. Things were going very well. Rainbow trout had also been introduced, and though they crowded out the native cutthroats, nobody really worried. Fishing was great. And bears were increasing in numbers, and moose, and bison.

By 1915, Roosevelt realized the elk had become a problem, and urged "scientific management." His advice was ignored. Instead, the park service did everything it could to increase their numbers.

The results were predictable.

Antelope and deer began to decline, overgrazing changed the flora, aspen and willows were being eaten heavily and did not regenerate. In an effort to stem the loss of animals, the park rangers began to kill predators, which they did without public knowledge.

They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn’t predators that were killing the other animals. It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.

Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk.

With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning.

There were also persistent rumors that rangers were trucking them in; but in any case, the wolves vanished soon after; they needed a diet of beaver and other small rodents, and the beaver had gone.

Pretty soon the park service initiated a PR campaign to prove that excessive numbers of elk were not responsible for the park’s problems, even though they were. This campaign went on for a decade, during which time the bighorn sheep virtually disappeared.

Now we come to the 1970s, when bears are starting to be recognized as a growing problem. They used to be considered fun-loving creatures, and their close association with human beings was encouraged within the park:

Bear feedings were a spectacle in the 1930s. Postcards treated it humorously:

But now it seemed there were more bears and many more lawyers, and thus more threat of litigation. So the rangers moved the grizzlies away to remote regions of the park. The grizzlies promptly became endangered; their formerly growing numbers shrank. The park service refused to let scientists study them. But once the animals were declared endangered, the scientists could go in.

And by now we are about ready to reap the rewards of our forty-year policy of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear, all that. The Indians used to burn forest regularly, and lightning causes natural fires every summer. But when these fires are suppressed, the branches that drop to cover the ground make conditions for a very hot, low fire that sterilizes the soil. And in 1988, Yellowstone burned. All in all, 1.2 million acres were scorched, and 800,000 acres, one third of the park, burned.

Then, having killed the wolves, and having tried to sneak them back in, the park service officially brought the wolves back, and the local ranchers screamed. And on, and on.

As the story unfolds, it becomes impossible to overlook the cold truth that when it comes to managing 2.2 million acres of wilderness, nobody since the Indians has had the faintest idea how to do it. And nobody asked the Indians, because the Indians managed the land very intrusively. The Indians started fires, burned trees and grasses, hunted the large animals, elk and moose, to the edge of extinction. White men refused to follow that practice, and made things worse.

To solve that embarrassment, everybody pretended that the Indians had never altered the landscape. These “pioneer ecologists,” as Steward Udall called them, did not do anything to manipulate the land. But now academic opinion is shifting again, and the wisdom of the Indian land management practices is being discovered anew. Whether we will follow their practices remains to be seen.

Now, if we are to do better in this new century, what must we do differently? In a word, we must embrace complexity theory. We must understand complex systems.

We live in a world of complex systems. The environment is a complex system. The government is a complex system. Financial markets are complex systems. The human mind is a complex system---most minds, at least.

By a complex system I mean one in which the elements of the system interact among themselves, such that any modification we make to the system will produce results that we cannot predict in advance.

Furthermore, a complex system demonstrates sensitivity to initial conditions. You can get one result on one day, but the identical interaction the next day may yield a different result. We cannot know with certainty how the system will respond.

Originally Posted by Fresh One

I guess the other option is to just let mother nature take its course and see what happens. In the case of mountain lions, that would probably end up being no more sheep, not many deer and a sick and starving lion population. Not too mention an increase in human/lion interaction as they come looking for food. None of that sounds as reasonable as some basic management but that is just me.

Funny, animals and mother nature seem to have done quite well on their own for more than 4 BILLION years here on earth but apparently now all is lost unless people step in and 'manage' things?



It really sounds stupid when you say it out loud....

[johnnylite]

Originally Posted by Fresh One

One thing I know, we need more threads like this on BD. Good healthy debate and discussion whether we agree or agree to disagree. I get tired of reading the "Saw a white F-250 on I-15 with a BD sticker" posts.

Amen now let's go hunting and fishing.