For years, environmentalists have tried to put out the fact that overhunting has become a problem for the past years or so. They condemn hunting, saying that not only is it abusive to the animals that are involved when they are captured and/or killed for the amusement and sport of hunters, it also has dire environmental effects that may seem nonexistent at first, but is actually slowly progressing until things reach the point of no return.
It might seem difficult to grasp what effects overhunting does to the world at first, and this can be one of the reasons as to why people don’t have much of an incentive to stop hunting once they begin and realize that they enjoy it. But there are more reasons as to why this happens, and a good number of them involve things that happen in our society.
If we wish to put a stop to the effects of overhunting in our society or even the world at large, first we need to understand why overhunting happens in the first place. These things don’t just happen in a bubble, after all, and it usually comes from people or even industries wanting something out of it because it benefits them in some way or form. The lens as to how to tackle this type of issue doesn’t just involve stopping hunting altogether immediately no matter the consequences, because our world is much more complicated and nuanced than that, and simply putting a lid on hunting without trying to understand any of that can also prove to have great consequences for the society we live in today.
So why does overhunting happen?
Increased population and increased demand
This cause is two-fold and can even go hand-in-hand with each other. For instance, the human population on Earth over many years has skyrocketed. It took millions of years for humanity to reach their first billion population, and it only took 200 years after that to reach billion. Humanity is clearly multiplying at an explosive rate, and while there is data that suggests that the explosive population growth will decrease as soon as more countries develop into better societies, even the impact such a large population has on the world now can already be felt, especially in sectors that involve hunting.
For an increasing population, the problem is simple. The more people there are over the world, the more chances that more of them will want to hunt. Even if it’s only a tiny percentage of the world population, that can still be a very significant amount when dealing with percentages in terms of billions of people. And depending on the country or culture, these percentages can increase or decrease, which means that animals in the wild are being killed at a much faster rate than normal, whether it’s through legal or illegal hunting. This means that animals are more vulnerable as a result, while humanity’s population skyrockets, the population of hunted animals decreases, leading to less animals being able to reproduce and potentially making them struggle to gain back their population as a result.
Now, for the increase in demand, this is something that is dependent on multiple factors, such as how much a certain society values meat or animal products in general. Population will of course play a big role in this aspect. A bigger population means more chances that someone will buy animal products, especially if they are raised under a household that values or enjoys animal products and/or meat. But animals aren’t hunted simply for their meat or for consumption. Certain animal species, like elephants for instance, aren’t hunted for food, but for their body parts. Going back to the elephants, they are hunted for their tusks which are made to produce ivory. Ivory is used in a multitude of accessories and jewelry, and even used as material in other items like piano keys in the past. Unfortunately, unlike hunting for meat which at least fills a survival instinct, this type of hunting is more or less done simply to show off one’s luxuries by having different accessories. This has led to the decline and even endangerment of many elephants and other animals similar to it.
Troubling future
For now, we don’t seem to be experiencing the effects of such things. Accessories made of elephant tusks are going into circulation still, shark attacks happening mean that sharks are still swimming about, and there are still myriads of deer running about in the many forests of the world that hunters shoot at, and these same deer may also be causing traffic accidents. But that doesn’t mean that these problems aren’t there. While it seems like things are alright and that the world is still spinning right now, things may not be in the future.
The thing about these types of problems is that they don’t appear suddenly, you don’t wake up one day to find out that all the elephants have disappeared from Earth. You see it as a slow and painful process as the elephants slowly die out and the nature preserves desperately try to keep the last remaining ones alive, and it is important to be aware of such things when taking into consideration about the problems that hunting can have.