If you’re a hunter, you ought to know about the effects that hunting can have on the wildlife. Hunting itself can be good for the hunter by helping bring them close to nature (literally) while also helping in keeping animal populations in check, but it’s a fine balance to walk, and can easily cause more trouble than it’s worth if no one is watching.
This article is here to spread awareness of what overhunting can do to the wildlife that you are hunting. After all, you’re taking out entire animals away from their own ecosystems of which they are meant to be the prey of another wild animal or possibly even a predator of a different species. Initially, it might seem like nothing changes at first, but there definitely are shifts in the environment. It might be slow, but it’s most certainly there.
Let’s walk through some of the effects that overhunting can have.
Massive loss of wildlife population
You might think at first, that this shouldn’t be a big deal. After all, you’re only hunting deer and bringing home one every hunt. With so many deer out in the forest, this shouldn’t affect them, right?
This would be true if you were the only hunter out there. One hunter killing even 10 deer a day won’t make a dent in the deer population all over the world, no matter how hard he tried. But 100,000 hunters killing even a single deer per day is a different story. As you might expect, there are many hunters all over the world doing their own thing and hunting alongside you. You obviously don’t see them, since some of them might be found in different cities or even countries. Not only that, their reasoning for hunting differs from person to person. Some might be doing it for sport, others might be doing it to put food on the table, others still might be hunting because of their culture.
This basically means hunters can come in all shapes and sizes, instead of simply your average gun-toting deer hunter. Some people hunt bigger animals, which can be very bad as well. Elephants, for instance, are already being threatened because of such hunters, but there are other animals that are suffering such as tigers as well.
This results in a massive decrease in the population of animals in any given area. Since people aren’t satisfied with simply hunting deer, they go for stronger targets that they would want to display, not realizing or even caring that they’re basically potentially threatening an already endangered species. In fact, some animals around the world have already gone extinct because of overhunting, and if nothing is done about this, more species will soon follow.
It affects the ecosystem they live in as well
Animals don’t live on their own. They fit perfectly in an ecosystem of other plants and animals, either being predators or prey. Taking away some of these animals by hunting them may not do much in the short-term, but repeated hunting and driving down the population of such animals will lead to a chain reaction of not just the animals dying out, but also the ecosystem they live in declining. It seems farfetched, but many living organisms and plants depend on each other for survival, and the decline in population of one will highly likely lead to the decline of population with the others.
Dependency does not necessarily mean that animals rely on each other for support either, but rather they are dependent on them existing to help them survive. For instance, predators are dependent on prey animals roaming around in forests for them to hunt, otherwise they would starve. Less or no deer for instance would mean that they would most likely suffer this fate, due to a lack of food. Indeed, the disruption of the ecosystem comes not only with the environment, but even the food chain located inside the ecosystem, and it will throw the population of the creatures living inside said ecosystem off balance. Insects might have an explosive growth due to a lack of natural predators, meaning that the trees they feed on will die out, for instance.
Migration and Hibernation disruption
Unfortunately, ecosystems are not the only things that overhunting can disrupt. Even migratory and hibernation activities of animals can be disrupted, as they will be more focused on not getting killed by hunters rather than migrating properly. If they remain stuck in place, they may end up dying due to bad weather conditions or starvation.
Pollution of the environment in general
This one is less about hunters shooting at animals, and more about what the hunter has to do to get to the animal in the first place. They bring vehicles to forests which emit carbon dioxide, and leave them there. They’ll also be making campsites in locations that they may deem suitable for hunting, which, if not properly cared for, can lead to a forest fire if a hunter decides to make a campfire. This is the worst possible scenario and should be avoided as much as possible.
Finally, it is not uncommon for hunters to leave their litter on the ground as they focus more on their target, since they don’t want to lose sight of what they are hunting. As a result, hunters can leave a significant carbon footprint in any forest they hunt in.