Ruminations on the approaching hunting season
Ohio’s fall hunting season opens Sept. 1, with or without further reflection. Nonetheless, let it be remembered that because predator and prey are part of the natural state of life, hunting never ends. Sept. 1, then, represents more of a technicality, a limit that humans decided they’d have to put on themselves.
Squirrels, among the first game in play, used to be eaten by people who made a living off the land. Squirrel meat can be tasty and fill a need for protein.
But the latest U.S. census shows rural residents continue to move off the land and into metropolitan areas, where they find plenty of untouchable squirrels and a seemingly endless supply of Big Macs available for money and little effort.
Though exempt from becoming hunting casualties, metro squirrels can end up collateral damage of city living. How many squirrels have died beneath the wheels of a vehicle speeding to pick up a Big Mac or its equivalent? Likely more than end up as dinner on the plates of families in a given year.
A second reflection: Only human hunters require constraints such as seasons, bag limits and species selectivity. The need for regulation became obvious well over a century ago when hunted animals became first more difficult to find, and soon after began to vanish from places they’d been common.
Regulations came too late to save some state denizens, including bison and eastern elk. Humans, being adaptable omnivores, find substitutes for what they wipe out, so cows and pigs took their place. Currently, wildlife makes up only an estimated 4% of the biomass of land species on the planet, the other 96% comprising people, livestock, and other odds and ends.
Big Macs, in short, aren’t threatened by regulation, even though their advertised main ingredient might be someday if nothing real ever gets done to reverse climate change and safeguard wildlife.
Predatory creatures face hunger, starvation and death when their numbers become too large for the food supply; and a recent study suggests the stress of near death brings life-altering fear that results in a lower birth capacity in the traumatized animal. Fewer copies of prey mean less food for the predator.
The dominant omnivore that invents tools with which to kill, not to mention to produce food on demand, has come to believe itself the exceptional biological singularity that can dictate to nature. The evidence isn’t yet all in.
A final reflection: The fact that people can declare hunting season open or closed, not unlike a fast-food joint, suggests that the approach we are taking to the world is not entirely a natural one.
It’s possible to imagine Daniel Boone shuddering at what transpires today. Boone, though, might also concede this time and place is not much like his.