As a vegetarian, I’m against hunting. I’m not too happy about guns in general, but I don’t want to get into that at the moment. The problem with me being against hunting is that the first thing a hunting-advocate will say is that the deer population is too large for them to be able to survive, so allowing hunters to kill them actually helps them. Unless that is just not true, I don’t have a response to it. I’d like to think that the deer population would just level off without hunters and would simmer down to its true carrying capacity, but I realize that the main reason that the creatures are over-populated is that we’ve built our cities on their homes. Plus, I can’t really be against the murder of deer but for letting them die of starvation. I even like the idea that if people are going to eat meat that they kill it themselves, I’d just rather them not eat it in the first place. Which causes another problem for me because I know from my limited nutrition studies that humans aren’t natural vegeterians and in fact need nutrients that come primarily from flesh (especially Iron and B12) to be healthy.
So here I sit, disliking hunting but not being able to properly argue against it. (List of things Dave doesn’t like but can’t as yet logically oppose: hunting - check, non-coerced prostitution - check).
And then Fark links to this article from Sky News about kangaroo over-population in Australia. It seems that the vegetation near a military base can’t support even half of the kangaroos living there, so the Australian Army has been given permission to use them as target practice. And I think, “Wow, that’s terrible. Not as bad as pusing dolphins to difuse landmines][2], but it’s pretty damn terrible.” But then the internal argument begins. “Wait, Dave, if the kangaroos are going to starve or eat every plant on the continent, they’re going to die anyway. Doesn’t this solution take care of the overpopulation problem plus give the army valuable experience?” I just don’t know.