quote:Originally posted by Danny: An animal dying out of nothing more than sport is an entirely different thing. If marksmanship is your sport, then head down to a shooting range, or find yourself some tin cans.
The "sport" of hunting is actually a bi-product of a larger concern. Animal populations, like human, do indeed grow year by year due to reproduction (I think all of us here have heard of that). If there is no hunting of these animals, their populations become larger than the food source and leads to starvation. Hunting helps keep these numbers down. Each state governments here in the U.S. monitor the population and release hunting limits based on the current population. So it's not just Bubba and Earl going out and seeing what they can kill. It's a way of preventing the entire animal population from starving to death.
A food chain has predators, sure - but don't you have big cats for that sort of thing?
And its not a smooth food chain. Mass starvations occur. There was some distressing footage the yera before last of thousands of kangaroos bouncing into huge fences while trying to get to water in a drought. Many of them died, but the kangaroo is in no danger of extinction because of it. You don't need hunters when the system takes care of itself.
