Hunting for many can provide a form of relaxation. It happens outdoors, which means that people are able to get out and enjoy the beauty of nature instead of simply staying cooped up indoors. It has a lot of involvement, making your efforts feel validated when you finally bag the kill at the end. It also means that you’ll be moving around a lot, so not only are you enjoying what nature has to offer, you’re giving your own body a good workout.
Clearly, the sport of hunting provides tremendous amounts of benefits to those who partake in it, even if they don’t necessarily always end with a catch, so what seems to be the big deal? Is there a problem with such a sport, especially one that you don’t always partake in? As it turns out, the benefits of hunting are individualized and don’t necessarily apply to everyone. Not only that, overhunting in itself can cause massive chain reactions that impact not only just the immediate environment, but potentially also the world at large.
Effects on animals
You would think that simply shooting at a bunch of deer every few seasons wouldn’t really do much. In fact, with your fellow hunters, you might even be doing them a favor! After all, deer overpopulation is itself a problem, and deer traversing forests with no natural predators will multiply fast.
Now, having lots of deer might not seem like a problem at first since it means that forests will have wildlife, at least until you realize that having more deer means an increased chance of accidents down the road when more deer will likely cross out of the blue. Not only that, but deer can also eat too much of the plant life and potentially kill off the habitat of other creatures that live in the forest.
This is all well and fine, because the population of deer definitely needs to be controlled, but sometimes people aren’t content with only hunting deer. They might choose to hunt other animals that they know nothing about, except for the fact that they might look cool mounted on their walls. Some of these animals have actually been hunted to the point that they are endangered, and in the worst-case scenario, have become extinct as a result.
Effects on the environment
But let’s say that you’re not like these exotic hunters and only target more common animals like deer, it should be fine then, right? Well, something you should keep in mind is that deer also serve a purpose in its environment. An overpopulation of deer definitely becomes a problem when the environment it is in becomes unable to sustain them because of how large their population size is, but an underpopulation of deer is also a problem. Surprisingly, it also means a reduction of plants in the environment, or more specifically, trees.
As mentioned earlier, deer eat a lot of fruits, and are likely the ones that eat those that fall to the ground. This actually serves an important purpose for tree reproduction, as it contributes to the dispersal of the parent plant’s seeds by moving it away from them. If there are few herbivores like deer in the forest because of overhunting, seeds are not properly dispersed and will instead only be found near their parent plants, since that is where they will drop. This can potentially decrease the survival chances of said seeds, and in worst-case scenarios, outright reduce the growing population of trees and slowly lead them to extinction as well.
This plays into the chain-reaction bit mentioned earlier. The thing about animals in an ecosystem is that they don’t just exist in a bubble that can be taken out with not side effects. Maybe a couple of deer, or a couple of trees won’t impact things too heavily in the long run initially, but it’s not like this is a one-time thing. Hunting is a sport that consistently has many people having a go in trying it out because it appeals to them one way or another, and if they see themselves truly enjoying the sport while trying it out, bagged buck or no, they’ll likely be coming back again and again to enjoy themselves.
Wrapping up
Everything mentioned in the article seems to portray hunting in a bad light, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The thing is, like any other thing, hunting should never be overdone. As mentioned earlier, hunting does have its benefits, not just for the individual doing the hunting, but also for the environment, if it’s done right that is.
This is why hunting regulations are important in ensuring that overhunting never becomes a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a widespread thing yet – some cultures for instance, have hunting as part of their blood whether it’s through their ancestry, while others have laws that haven’t caught up to the modern day yet, and as such the hunting laws aren’t effective and sometimes, they may not even exist at all!
This article’s goal is simple: to bring attention to overhunting and what it can do to us and our planet in the long run. Sure, we might be able to enjoy mother nature and enjoy the exercise that comes with hunting, but do it too much, and we’ll eventually lose these things we love so much.