That seems like it would have been a good thing to the extent that it would also have shifted the focus of wildlife conservation away from “more game animals”.
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The ecological impact should always include the amount of lead introduced into the environment from shooting. 6000 tonnes of lead every year in the UK alone and it gets into the food chain for humans and animals as well. I’m not against hunting as such but I am against shooting which is what we get for the most part in the UK. Millions of half tame birds are released into the countryside to compete for food with wild species and predate on already struggling wildlife, then they’re shot en masse using lead ammunition and passed off as a healthy wild food source. If people want to shoot then let’s restore large areas of habitat and organise sustainable harvesting of wild birds.
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I’m kind of surprised the UK hasn’t banned lead shot yet. Here in Canada its use was banned for migratory game bird hunting in 1997. There is a complete ban in many public use areas as well. It is still technically allowed on private land and for hunting upland game birds but most hunters I know have made the switch to lead alternatives completely. Unfortunately we are still feeling with the toxic effects of legacy lead from hunting and many other human activities.
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Lead weights for fishing are also pretty ubiquitous. this is what I found for the us: https://bicojigs.com/lead-law/#:~:text=Lead%20consumption%20is%20not%20only,around%20the%20waters%20we%20fish.&text=In%20general%2C%20the%20laws%20prohibit,sinkers%20weighing%20under%20one%20ounce.
IE there’s only a few states that ban them at all. Which… seems like a big problem. Even if it got banned nationally though, I feel like it wouldn’t help much without a serious public relations campaign, because I guarantee that my dad has some decades-old lead split shot knocking around in the bottom of his tackle box. Hell, I probably do. (I need to remind myself to buy some non-lead sinkers next time I go fishing)
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A few years ago I went back through my old fishing gear and the stuff I inherited from my father and got rid of all the lead. In my father’s stuff I found what I think must have been one of the first lead free sinkers. It had to be at least 30 years old. Sometimes change is hard and slow.
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For sure. And its something you wouldn’t even think of - stuff like tackle, you might buy a baggie of split shot and unless break your line a lot, which hopefully you’re not because that’s a lot of plastic line in the environment, you may never need to buy another bag. Or at least not for years and years.
I might have a talk with my dad next time I go fishing with him and see if I can get him all new weights, I’m sure he’d be down for it.
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There is a joke around here that if you really want to help a species, open a hunting season on it. Because people go to extraordinary lengths to preserve and enrich habitats for those hunted species. And as a by-product, other species benefit from those habitats as well. Hunters pour millions into the preservation and even reclamation/restoration of habitat to benefit game species.
Stop hunting and you’ll probably see fewer species overall due to habitat loss. People will just turn the land into yet another agricultural/monoculture (i absolutely despise monocultures like all the pine around me grown for lumber) desert or just develop it because it has no other benefits to them.
I am not a hunter but I know many ethical hunters who work hard at setting aside habitat and enrich it as well as donating to many nature preservation entities such as the Nature Conservancy. They also work with officials monitoring wildlife disease such as chronic wasting disease in deer. They aren’t all evil killers the way they are largely portrayed by the media.
I really wish people wouldn’t consider all hunters to be lowlifes. There are many ethical ones and in fact they are probably the majority but they get lumped in with the bad apples and the entire sport is denigrated because of it.
They probably contribute more to wildlife than most other groups, sadly enough. And yet they are usually vilified. There are bad people in any group.
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It’s not so surprising when you look at who does the shooting and who makes the laws. Lord Shootington doesn’t want to ruin his very expensive antique shotguns so lead shot is the only option. Shooting in the UK would barely exist if it wasn’t the hobby of the rich and influential.
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Good point. That was an argument that was made here too. People adapted though. Quickly.
There are definitely ethical hunters, but unfortunately - and like with every other controversial topic - sometimes the loudest and most obnoxious ones end up being the poster children. And that really isn’t fair.
There’s a farming youtuber I watch (who is a hunter himself) that absolutely got in to it with some hound hunters a while ago because the hounds kept chasing bears and ending up on his property, despite him having no trespassing signs posted properly. Just absolutely freaking out his livestock dogs in the middle of the night - and the amount of blowback he got for making videos about it was ridiculous, despite him just wanting people to control their animals and not trespass.
As an aside, I really wish someone in my family was a deer hunter, because I really do enjoy me some venison. Anyone in Ohio have any to donate? ;p
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Not always. Some hunting is done with the intent of removing predators.
I think it is important to separate hunting from eradication efforts. For example shooting coyotes was not generally considered hunting by most people. It was an effort to deliberately eliminate coyotes under the mistaken belief that they were a worthless species that ‘stole’ game from people. I don’t know anyone who has shot a coyote for food or even as a trophy. Unfortunately the view that some predators are simply vermin or dangerous still holds true in some parts.
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That’s the wrong tense. This is still a very common practice throughout the western U.S.—mostly recreational, but also paid for by the federal government.
Whether or not it’s hunting… well, “hunting coyotes” gives about 50,000,000 results on google, while “shooting coytoes” gives about 8,000,000 results. “Hunting” is the word most people use for it.
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Perhaps hunting coyotes is an American thing? But you have it right when you say it is paid for by the government. The government paid and sometimes still pays because it is part of an eradication program. If you don’t want coyotes eradicated the first step is to advocate against bounty payments.
I always thought that was what resentful hunters said when closing the hunting season did not make the rare species come back.
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Unfortunately, it is also a Canadian thing. 
Hunting is not OK at all from an ecological perspective. Animals live, animals die, sometimes populations go up, sometimes they go down. Humans tend to think along the lines of ecological engineering, we see a problem and think we can fix it. The solution arrived at is usually a bullet or a trap, and it never works. Killing things is easy, stepping back and letting nature take its course is much harder. Time and again experience has shown that the only reliable way to seperate humans from things that interrupt their amenity is barriers like fences.
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Which have their own set of negative ecological impacts.
I don’t think the answer is as simple as hunting is always good or always bad. I think it is more situational and more nuanced than that. Certainly, I don’t think hunting does nearly as good a job at herbivore population control as a natural suite of predators. Unfortunately, in many areas, a natural suite of predators is unlikely to be restored for political and/or biological reasons.
Now for things like vertebrate pest management, I agree. Lethal control has been proven time and time again to be ineffective. Killing the fox that’s eating your chickens only solves the problem until the next fox moves into the now-vacant territory. It is a much better solution to fox-proof your chicken coop. That’s why lethal options are the last resort in Integrated Pest Management (IPM).
Unfortunately, where predators have already been removed, nature will never be able to take its course. I think some lethal removal of deer via hunting can serve better than cyclic periods of boom and bust (starvation) of populations. Additionally, hunting of overpopulated herbivores can produce some of the most sustainable food out there (far more sustainable than commercial, even vegetarian/vegan, diets). The scale is limited, of course; it would not be sustainable to feed everyone on wild game.
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I disagree with you, @agileantechinus , for two reasons. While I would agree that “let nature take its course” is a good first guess when we don’t know how to manage ecosystems, it’s not often not the best choice when we have already radically changed nature. In eastern North America, we’ve destroyed non-human predators to the point that deer populations can only be controlled by human hunting or disease or starvation. Before starving, the deer destroy whatever vegetation they can reach and eat, damaging not only plants (which matter, too!) but also other animals through removing their food or changing their habitats.
Also, we humans are a part of nature, though we often think of ourselves as something different, something that can be separated from nature as by a fence. Hunting by humans and by our hominin ancestors has been a part of nature for millions of years. (That doesn’t make hunting necessarily a good thing in any particular case, of course!) I think it’s important to remember that hunting by Native Americans was a major factor controlling for deer populations in eastern North America, more important for the last few thousand years than predation by non-human predators.
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No, hunting is just to keep people happy, wild populations can manage themselves. I have seen all the arguments and the main thing they lack is any sort of logic. There are never many predators, being a predator is hard. If there isn’t enough food animals die, they die pretty soon anyway.