Reply #73: Nope, not even remotely close [View All]

[EstimatedProphet]

Deer aren't being forced into urban areas, they LIKE it there. They do quite well in urban areas. Think that's your neighbor's dog rooting around in your trash? Think again...
Golf courses, parks, big suburban backyards are all home to deer. They reproduce like crazy there, and then get overcrowded, leading them to get run over by cars and starve. Putting predators out in the wild won't even touch this.
Also, I'd say that it would take a pretty bad hunter to be less humane than predators. Red wolves (traditional predator of deer in the eastern US) will get a deer down, then start tearing it apart. They don't make any attempt to ensure it's dead first; they take what they can get. If it's still kicking when they rip it's legs off, so be it.
Diseases like EHD, lyme disease, and bluetongue have been common in deer herds as long as they have been in existence. They, like all bacterial/parasitic/arboviral diseases, are positively correllated with high densities. So, cutting down the number of deer reduces the number of infected animals. Excessive numbers of animals leads to epizootics that kill off whole herds (especially with EHD and bluetongue). Reduce those numbers past a critical threshhold, and often there's no loss to disease at all.
Now, PETA may not believe in giving up their primary goal in favor of their secondary one. But given that, why should I support their pursuing their secondary goal (better meat production) knowing that it is a means to an end to their primary goal (completely forced vegan society)? I didn't support Bush's tax "cut" even though I liked getting the $300, because I knew that the end goal was to produce a smokescreen that would allow the superrich to get a huge cut, and damage the US budget.
And one other question: if you do agree that animals need to be controlled, as in the case of deer, why are you opposed to people benefitting from it?