Quote Originally Posted by Carnage
And as for huntng, Im sure nature would find a way to kill off overpopulation. Disease would probably spread amongst the deer in overcroweded areas, godwilling humans remain immune to Dear disease. Im not an expert, so I could be wrong, but I think predators of Deer are afraid of big cars with big headlights. I dont think they would dare come into a human town and start eating people. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.
No, in fact. Deer's natural predators mainly consist of wolves and cougars. Wolves and cougars are largely not present in much of the US, due to the presence of people. Top tier predators require large ranges, and having a giant grid of farmland and roads and fences doesn't quite lend itself to that. Further, wolves in particular are known to take livestock, causing many local farmers not to tolerate them. Incidentally, only top-tier predators can take deer, and deer are even work for a small pack of wolves, which will typically pick smaller, lower-risk game given the option.

In the absence of natural predators, it's not disease that kills deer, it's starvation. Anyone with the slightest ounce of humanity realizes that it's a lot less cruel for a portion of the population to die by being shot by a skilled hunter than for a larger portion of the population to die of starvation. Further, when the population starves to death, it for the most part starves wholesale -- available food in the winter simply runs out, and nothing eats.

Deer overpopulation is also a significant human problem. Deer get driven into cities and suburbs, looking both for food and for territory. They get hit by cars, causing not only deer deaths but human death. They destroy property. They raze farmland. In short, deer overpopulation quickly becomes a problem to more than just the deer.

Regular culling of deer is the ONLY way, absent abandoning our cities and farms and restoring the wolf population to its natural levels, to prevent this in areas where deer thrive. Any ecologist worth calling an ecologist will generally tell you that.

Near my hometown, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has a nature preserve area consisting of a forest and a prairie, and a herd of bison (all within city limits, where it's illegal to discharge a firearm except in certain situations), Once a year they close it off, and a team of professional marksmen goes through and culls the deer population. Every couple of years they also light portions of their prairie area on fire. If they were to stop culling the deer, they would need a small pack (3-5) of wolves. The wolf pack would (a) not respect the boundaries of the half a square mile of forest, and (b) not respect the lives of the neighboring pets. Or they would die on the fairly busy nearby road. Either way, natural predators are not an option.

This has nothing to do with Virginia Tech, or insane shooters, and is only marginally tangential in that it has to do with gun control. None of this has anything to do with a perceived American imperialism.

(I was going to post this like 2 hours ago, but got distracted. I'll probably have something to say about the rest of the thread when I read it )