Eight reasons why deer hunters should not have a say in predator conservation
by: Biologist John Laundre
It never ceases to amaze me how uninformed and completely wrong (to put it kindly) hunters are regarding how nature works! I have to admit, it makes it easier for me and I could write a different piece daily on just how naïve hunters are! The latest contribution by the hunting industry is an article titled: “8 Reasons Deer Hunters Should Hunt Coyotes”, subtitled: “We all need to be killing more coyotes”. In this article, the author lists those 8 supposed reasons and then follows each up with clear examples of how little he does know about nature! And why they are 8 reasons hunters should NOT be involved in the management of predators! Though you can read them via the link above, let’s go through them and look more closely at these supposed justifications for not just killing a native predator, but killing as many as you can!
Reasons 1 (Coyotes kill fawns) and 2 (Fawn recruitment rates are already too low). I lump these because they are both related to coyotes killing deer fawns. As the author points out the first one really is a “duh” statement. Predators kill their prey! THAT is what predators do! THAT is how nature works! AND, any predator will concentrate on young of the year when available! THAT is why prey species have so many young! Any population biologist will tell you that ALL of the science indicates prey species have evolved to compensate for this mortality in the young and still maintain their populations, this includes deer. So much so that the young of the year are referred to as the “expendable” age class. You can have a lot of them die and still not affect the population, as long as you don’t have a lot of adults dying. In fact, coyotes, by killing expendable animals are actually hunting very ecologically, eating the interest as it were but leaving the principle (see Reason 3).
However, as the author points out, for hunters, and this leads to reason number 2, coyotes are eating too much of the interest, according to… hunters! They feel that coyotes are not leaving enough young to replace adult loses, which by the way, are primarily from human hunters. He gives the example of fawn recruitment (number of fawns per female that survive their first year) and bemoans the fact that for most areas it is less than 1.0 fawn per doe. Of course, he then goes to list the most extreme low recruitments of 0.4 and 0.3, as if they were somehow the average, they are not! But be that as it may, let’s look at these numbers.
First, there is an estimated 30 million deer in the U.S. If two thirds of them are does, a reasonable estimate, that means at a 1 fawn per doe recruitment, there are approximately 20 MILLION fawns that reach adulthood EACH YEAR! Hunters kill about 6 million, mostly adult, deer yearly, leaving a net 14 million additional deer entering the population each year! At this rate, deer populations would and are continuing to grow exponentially! If we want a stable population, which I thought was the management goal, those additional 14 million fawns or a combination of fawns and adults NEED to die! So, thank goodness that there is only one state where such high recruitment rates exist. They will not exist for long there however, if not killed by predators (human or otherwise), this state is scheduled for a mass die off of deer from hunger or disease…that is the way of nature! Is that what hunters want?
Now let’s look at this presumably low recruitment rate of 0.3 fawns per doe. Again, approximately 20 million does will result in a recruitment of 6 million fawns reaching adulthood. Here let me do the math as it is obvious that the author did not. 30 million deer, 66% are does, equaling around 20 million (I rounded off from 19.8). Recruitment rate is 30% (this is the 0.3 fawns per doe the author cites as the LOWEST recruitment rate). Thirty percent of 20 million is….6 million! Now, how many deer do hunters kill each year? Oh yeah…6 million! Hmm, according to my math, even at the lowest recruitment rate the author reported, deer numbers would appear stable! How about the 0.4 rate the author bemoans? At this recruitment rate, 8 million new deer will enter the population, 2 million more than hunters kill! Any recruitment rate above the 0.3 leaves more deer than the hunters can kill! As even 0.4 is lower than the average, it would appear that coyotes also cannot kill enough of them! For a stable deer population, we NEED more coyotes to save deer from starving!
Now on to Reason # 3: “yotes” kill adult deer. Again, stating the obvious, some, but as the author admits, not as many as fawns, adult deer are killed by coyotes. He backs this up with three, yes three videos of coyotes killing or trying to kill three, yes three adult deer! And from these three videos, never mind the mountains of scientific studies, he concludes that “they still kill quite a few. And the numbers add up.”! But, what does the scientific literature, that he is ignoring, say? Do the numbers “add up”? Study after study after study, including many done by the handmaidens of hunters, game agencies, and summaries of those studies have shown those numbers DO NOT add up! Adult deer are consistently found to be minor parts of a coyote’s diet and much of that is as carrion, animals that had already died from another reason. All one has to do is look at those videos the author links to see why adult deer do not figure prominently in a coyote’s diet, it is damn hard for a coyote to kill an adult deer
Who then are killing all those adult deer? Again, hmm….about 6 million of them are killed by human hunters, that’s 20% of the population! Human hunting has and continues to be the most important cause specific mortality in adult deer! Coyotes don’t even come close to this! And again, coyotes are primarily taking the interest, the expendable young, not the principal, the adults! They seem to know more about how nature works than humans, who are killing the principal, expecting the interest to replace those loses! IF hunters really knew how nature works, deer seasons would be fawns only! After all, aren’t hunters constantly claiming they are hunting to “put meat on the table”? Fawns provide nice tender meat, deer version of veal. In this case, should hunters not leave the adults to produce more of those tasty fawns the next year? Is that not how cattle are managed for food? How many ranchers gather up their brood cows in the fall and send them off to slaughter? Yet that is what hunters and their agencies do yearly, kill the principal. And they claim to know how nature works. They don’t even know how the livestock industry works!
Moving on to number 4: Wintering deer need help. After saying that coyotes aren’t really a major threat to adult deer, he somehow twists this around to indicate that maybe they are in the winter. Considering that “winter”, that is snow and cold, only happens in a handful of states, and even in those, winters are getting milder, we are talking about a perceived impact on a fraction of the 30 million deer during a brief, 2-3 months, time of the year. But again, do coyotes negatively impact deer in the winter to the point that they cause major declines in deer numbers? The science, again ignored, indicates not. Regardless of predation pressures, the science indicates it is the weather stupid, it is the weather that determines how many deer die during the winter. Coyotes, again, just are not a major mortality factor during those times, feeding mainly on deer killed by the weather. That is how nature works.
Number 5: Canines impact daylight deer activity. Not sure why he even bothers to list this as a reason to kill more coyotes. He clearly states that coyotes, like humans when they hunt, affect the activity patterns of deer. I have to ask two questions. First, if it is not a bad thing when humans do it, why is it suddenly bad when coyotes do it? And second, so what? What does he mean deer respond negatively? How? The only reason they are active is to forage. Does this mean they have to eat more at night? During the day? I know of no study, again that pesky science, indicating that first, deer shift their activity because of coyotes and second that it somehow has a negative effect on their survival. This is definitely a non-reason and again displays a lack of understanding of nature.
Number 6: Song dogs alter other habits. He makes this cover statement and adds his personal observation that he has seen (one time???) coyotes push deer out of an area. Again, the fact that he considers this to be “severe” situation demonstrates his lack of knowledge of wildlife and even domestic animal husbandry. I thought hunting was supposed to keep these people in touch with nature??? If it did he would know that, first of all, having deer move around the landscape is actually a good thing! Like the shepherd moving his sheep from one area to another, it actually increases their foraging efficiency. As a grazer stays in one area, the food becomes depleted, meaning less food ingested per time and the danger of overgrazing the area. This is why shepherds move their flocks, why ranchers move their cattle. If he did know anything about nature, he would have seen what coyotes do as a beneficial service! I have demonstrated with my work, yes scientific studies, not YOUTUBE videos, that predators are indeed the shepherds of nature, keeping their prey moving across the landscape, keeping them well fed. That is how nature works!
Number 7: You’ll see more deer… Kill more coyotes. See more deer. I can’t even begin to explain how this is ecologically stupid. But here are just a few reasons. With 30 million deer running around, many of them crashing into our cars, eating up our domestic plants, killing our forests, I would prefer to see fewer deer, especially along our highways and in our forests. Most scientists agree: We have too many deer! Why would seeing more deer be a desirable ecological goal… IF one know how nature works?
As for the premise the you would get more deer, desirable or not, if you killed more coyotes. I think I and the author with his numbers and videos, have amply shown that this premise has little, if any scientific basis. Yet he says it has been “proven time and again”. Where? He mentions studies conducted in the southeastern states, ignoring again all the other studies from everywhere that show differently. Killing coyotes or predators in general does NOT result in increasing deer numbers! Since he does not cite those studies he alludes to, I am not sure which or how many he is referring to. One study I did see in the literature tried to correlate a decline in deer in a southeastern state with the arrival and increase of coyotes in the area. The author of this work did present a graph showing coyote numbers increasing and deer numbers declining over time and based solely on that concluded that it had to be coyotes. Why did he draw that conclusion? He drew that conclusion because he felt he had ruled out any other cause such as those millions of deer basically eating themselves out of house and home. Though this pattern has been demonstrated repeatedly in the literature, he felt that in his area this could not have been the case, not because he had measured available food supplies but because… the forest was still green! Apparently, he felt that as long as vegetation was green, deer could eat it! Never mind the picky detail of food preferences, inedible exotic plants spread by overgrazing deer. Never mind those details, it had to have been the coyotes. Why? Because his study was financed by the state game agency! This is not to impugn all other studies from that region but until the author of the “we need to kill more coyotes” article can produce them, it really is his word again…science!
Lastly Number 8: Coyotes need managing, too. Coyotes---like all animals---must be managed. This is really the kicker, the fallback position of the hunting industry. The raison d’êtde for hunting. If hunters can’t convince us that they hunt for food, but yet have “big buck” contests, then it is because we need to manage the wildlife, we need to manage nature! These poor animals, all of them, need our intervening. NEED us to kill them. We don’t really want to but if we don’t, nature will run amuck. We can’t have that! And of course, only we can do it! How dare nature think it can manage wildlife populations better than us! Animals killed (managed) by predators is a waste, even though they need that meat more than the predominantly well-off adult male humans that hunt. Consequently, WE need to manage the managers! It becomes our solemn duty, for many bordering on religious fervor, to blow those predators away! To manage them, as indicated by the author, by killing as many as we can, whenever we can, wherever we can, and with whatever means, no matter how cruel, we can use. We don’t want to do it, and for sure we don’t enjoy it… it just “has” to be done because, well… “ALL animals must be managed”.
Obviously, this and this reason alone disqualifies hunters from ever partaking in the management of predators. I would like to see this list of ALL animals that the author refers to. It has to be a short list that obviously does not contain the thousands of “nongame” animals that go about their lives “unmanaged” by humans, poor things. Do we manage song birds? Do we need a hunting season on robins? How do they survive without us killing a bunch of them, for their own good? But yet they seem to be doing just fine! Do we manage insects outside of agricultural areas? Maybe a trophy season on butterflies? Oh, wait we can only kill for food! How about small mammals in at least 80% of the areas they occur where they go unmanaged by humans? The list goes on and on and demonstrates that not ALL animals are or need to be managed. This “they must be managed” myth is just that a myth perpetuated by hunters to justify their killing, often times just for the thrill of killing, a select few species of the animal world.
And as for those that we traditionally think we need to manage, we find that historically, before modern management and European style killing, the herds of bison AND their predators, the herds of Caribou AND their predators, the herds of ungulates in Africa AND their predators, were doing just fine without human “management”! Even today, in protected areas, national parks, where animals are not managed (= killed), all seem to be doing fine! In fact, the less we “manage” the better it seems to work out for ALL species! IF management of wildlife numbers for the sake of all wildlife was the true goal of wildlife agencies, they would immediately ban hunting by humans and leave it to nature! According to the rational of hunters as presented in this article, predators seem more than capable of doing the job!
Why is that the case? Besides common sense, it makes evolutionary sense that predator prey systems do NOT need to be managed by humans, especially ones who know nothing about nature! IF a native predator was somehow going to “eat all its prey” as many hunters assume, then these predator prey systems would have died out eons ago. It makes common sense that the only ones to survive to today are the ones that have some degree of stability, within the impacts of weather, so that predator and prey persist. Science likens it to an evolutionary race that keeps either one or the other from “winning”. Where winning is certain death to both! It may be true that they may persist at level not acceptable to hunters but one has to ask if we should be running nature solely for the hunter, just so they can kill as many animals as they want? Should we not be managing for a healthy ecosystem, one that supports all native species? One that manages itself? In the case of deer and coyotes, science shows us that we actually need coyotes to kill more deer if we want such a balanced ecosystem!
If anything needs to be managed it is humans. We are the ones that muck up nature. We humans are the reasons prey populations have declined, first through just outright slob hunting and now through habitat loss and a variety of reasons. Yet we find it easier to blame predators like coyotes and not address the real reason…us.
Lastly, the tone of this article is like the tone of so many uninformed, naïve missives from the hunting industry about management of wildlife. If management just means killing a bunch of animals because someone thinks it is the right thing to do, then spare me that management. Such management it is NOT based on science. Such management does not get at the real causes impacting wildlife today. Such management is just an excuse for modern day hunters to be slob hunters like their ancestor so they can kill and kill some more. Such management is NOT conservation, regardless of how many bogus reasons someone might rise to justify it. People who think this is how we “manage” wildlife have no business doing so.
----------------------------------------------------
The Open Ecology Journal, 2010, 3: 1-7
John W. Laundre, Lucina Hernandez, William J. Ripple
Department of Biological Sciences, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126, USA.
Electronic publication date 3/2/2010
[DOI: 10.2174/1874213001003030001]
----------------------------------------------------
The Landscape of Fear: Ecological Implications of Being Afraid
The Open Ecology Journal, 2010, 3: 1-7
John W. Laundre, Lucina Hernandez, William J. Ripple
Department of Biological Sciences, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126, USA.
Electronic publication date 3/2/2010
[DOI: 10.2174/1874213001003030001]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment