grous•ers
1. Persons who hunt, trap, or pursue various plump, chickenlike game birds of the family Tetraonidae, chiefly of the Northern Hemisphere and having mottled brown or grayish plumage.
2. Complainers, or grumblers, and those prone to general ranting.
3. A number of “smart guys who hunt” and their generally smarter companions.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Quality Deer Management: A Risk-Averse View
Will bigger, higher-quality deer lead to more traffic fatalities? From today's CNN postings.
Added On February 19, 2010
Nashville police say a deer crashed through the windshield of a car and killed a young girl. WKRN reports.
A risk-averse argument for smaller, scrawnier 80-pound deer. Makes the eating of toxic-laden ducks seem positively harmless.
lest any of you think this is a silly or facetious point I'm making in this post--one of the arguments made by pro-deer contraception advocates in interviews Bruce Lauber and I did several years was that immunocontraception drugs helped keep the body mass of deer (particularly male deer) low. They reasoned that this was an ethical plus given their desire in places like Princeton and Hilton Head SC (where I did interviews) to minimize the effects of deer-car collisions.
When we asked them questions about the aesthetic loss of seeing scrawny, "emasculated" deer (although we didn't use THOSE terms obviously) (as always I paraphrase promiscuously and for dramatic effect), the interviewees appeared to be completely unmoved by the aesthetics of deer. The idea of "quality deer" was something they might see as a problem, not as a positive.
I can think of no stronger evidence of the primary role of puritanism in the animal rights movement than their unquestioned support of deer immunocantraception.
lest any of you think this is a silly or facetious point I'm making in this post--one of the arguments made by pro-deer contraception advocates in interviews Bruce Lauber and I did several years was that immunocontraception drugs helped keep the body mass of deer (particularly male deer) low. They reasoned that this was an ethical plus given their desire in places like Princeton and Hilton Head SC (where I did interviews) to minimize the effects of deer-car collisions.
ReplyDeleteWhen we asked them questions about the aesthetic loss of seeing scrawny, "emasculated" deer (although we didn't use THOSE terms obviously) (as always I paraphrase promiscuously and for dramatic effect), the interviewees appeared to be completely unmoved by the aesthetics of deer. The idea of "quality deer" was something they might see as a problem, not as a positive.
More things to think about . . . .
I can think of no stronger evidence of the primary role of puritanism in the animal rights movement than their unquestioned support of deer immunocantraception.
ReplyDelete-Joshua