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Ethical carnivory
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Practicability and ethics aside, do people not understand how ecosystems work? What do they think keeps herbivore populations from growing uncontrollably and overrunning our fields? Ask China about the sparrows.
Give the herbivores abstinence only education
Sorry sir. We've miscalculated the experiment and cows are republican now.
Republican cows, voting to subsidize the meat industry because "it's our heritage".
“As a cow, I vote for the meat industry because I might become a farmer one day!”
"One day I'll own this ~~boot~~ slaughterhouse!"
Absolutely not. This is why my friend who studies Forrest ecology sounds like an insane person whenever someone brings up deer.
Hes a lovely human being who really loves animals, but he honestly advocates that everyone should be forced to kill deer any time they see one.
CWD as well. Deer population collapse is real, because they have no real predators anymore. The sick bred and survive and you end up with crazy disease susceptible animals.
You're friend is absolutely correct. Proper conservation requires death.
Yep. From my understanding the native population of America basically reshaped all the forest in America to make the deer population go brrrr. Since we don't really hunt deer to the extent of the natives anymore, deer populations basically have stripped the forest of all shrubbery, low lying plants, and young native tree saplings.
It's more because white colonizers killed all the wolves, so deer don't have as many natural predators anymore.
It's pretty typical though that you would have heard someone "blame it on the indians" instead of the white settlers...
Wolves were not native to all of north America at the time when settler colonialists came to America. Nor were they ever in the amount of numbers that could control the deer population by themselves. Deer were a staple protein of native American societies and were utilized as free grazing stock animals by the tribal people in the anterior of America.
The native Americans developed the forest of America over thousands of years, and the overpopulation did not become a problem until the colonizers killed the actual predators who were namaging the deer population.... The native Americans.
The overpopulation got worse when white settlers expanded westward and killed off wolf populations as wolves were the only predators left to help moderate some of the overpopulation. However the real damage had already been done generations before when disease cut through the native American populations.
Just reintroduce wolves.
The problem is that wolves weren't really native to all the places deer overpopulated in America. The over population of deer wasn't a natural development, but a purposely implemented design by native populations of America that took place over thousands of years.
Humans hunting deer is really the only solution because humans reshaped the forest ecology to overproduce deer in the first place. A lot of people like to think that prior to European colonization, America had a pristine and untouched forest. In reality native Americans spent thousands of years reshaping the forest to basically become deer factories.
TIL, thank you. Then controlled/regulated hunting it is!
The problem is, there are fewer and fewer hunters every year. It's a problem that's just continually getting worse.
We had red wolves throughout the south. The northeast had timber wolves. Not to mention puma. Deer had predators everywhere they exist.
Which mainly prey upon small mammals like raccoons, possums, and rabbits. They also were never a large enough population to control deer populations even if that was all they were to hunt.
Again... Eastern wolves were rarely seen south of the Great lakes, and there's evidence that there were less than 70k prior to Europeans coming to the Americas.
On the other hand pre colonial white tail deer populations are estimated to be a little over 30 million.
I've seen entire herds with those weird tumors. I think I heard it's some type of prion disease...
Those are cutaneous fibromas or papilomas. Like big warts. Viral in nature.
CWD has no external symptoms beyond the listless "zombie" stage. It just turns the brain into swiss cheese.
I see, so I was thinking of two different diseases.
How do people who eat venison avoid prions?
You gamble... I stopped hunting and eating deer because of it. It's not worth the risk to me.
That's crazy. I grew up eating venison all the time. Maybe it wasn't as widespread back then. Now I'm happily vegetarian.
It wasn't at all. Now there are states and counties in some states with deer populations showing like 1 in 4 or even 50%+ of the entire population having CWD. I know the northern states, those populations are in real bad shape now.
Damn, that's crazy. You'd have better odds playing russian roulette.
You can send the neck lymph nodes and brain stem in for testing by your state wildlife agency. Wait for results.
Honestly there are a lot of hunters, not all, that just don't give a shit. No documented cases of CWD crossing into humans yet. I don't take the chance.
That's some scary stuff. Most hunters are probably the type to say science is just a liberal conspiracy, so it doesn't surprise me.
No prions for me, thanks.
https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2024/04/24/chronic-wasting-disease-feared-in-deaths-of-2-hunters-who-ate-deer-meat/
I think it has, or they think it has.
I try to reduce how much meat I eat, but if I had a good source on hunters’ venison, I wouldn’t say no.
Live in MA, I would gladly on sight deer for purely spiteful reasons. Glad to know I can cover up my seething hatred for nature's suicide bomber by saying it's based on sound ecological principals 😅
Surprisingly few people think about ecosystems. Those that do often do not gauge their complexity deeply enough and view them as temporally static for the most part.
That isn't true.
This bothers me.
It’s like ohhh don’t let the wolves kill the sweet deer! Get rid of the wolves, they’re mean!
If you don’t kill deer they get stupid and wander into roads, and they eat all your baby trees, then your forests die off.
Deer evolved with predation. When predators are around they behave differently, the system needs both to keep in balance.
And being vegan is fine, but animals don’t really have a conscience where they are in conflict with the morality of causing harm or it being optional for them.
This is easily solved by giving them access to contraceptives.
That was a great read. How did they do getting rid of rats and mosquitoes?
Ah, but you see, they have read the first part of beastars and the got bored, so they know that carnivores are evil and we should defend herbivores from them, like we should defend females from men (also evil)
Are you trying to blend anti-veganism and sexism in one weird crappy comment?
No, you see, I don't care about vegans, people can eat what they want. Animal ecosystems have nothing to do with that tho, and forcing human morals into the animals' behaviour is detrimental to the environment (i.e. you are forcing the animals behaviour and domesticating it to fit your ideal). So, please, go eat vegan, you are free, but don't come telling me we should seitan to lions because "think of the poor gazelles being eaten". Lions are not evil for eating gazelles, and gazelles are not the good guys because they are the eaten, they are just animals behaving how they evolved to behave.
There also is no sexism in that, you just went "oh, he doesn't like vegans, so he must be one of the people with all that shitty ideas I don't like" and decided to warp what I said as sexist in your mind. If anything it is anti-sexist, because the idea (of which I am explicitly making fun of because I do not agree with it) that all women are weak and all men are all uncontrollable predators, and we, the strong, should keep women separate from men for protection is extremely sexist in multiple ways (it is also why Christians say women should wear long dresses, and Muslims say women should wear a veil, which are both considered sexist).
I don't believe that vegans want to make wild animals be vegan. Some might, sure. But trying to display it as part of the vegan mentality is dishonest, and while there are a lot of stupid concepts around the idea of preventing animals from eating each other, it's a bit absurd to try to pretend that it's sooo hard to imagine wanting to avoid the horrible deaths of sentient creatures. It's not about evil, it's about suffering. And ridiculing all of those as a unit only serves the "people" who think animals are objects and can be tortured without care, as it pushes the idea that defending animals' well-being is pathetic and stupid.
No one thinks that all women are weak and all men are predator, but this is the common view of "woke" people by sexist people, that often go with crap such as "not all men" and whatever. So if you are actually trying to be anti-sexist, you should avoid saying the same as the sexists.
Have you... Have you read the tumblr post you are commenting under? It is about feeding meat substitutes to animals... And the top level comment I was replying to is saying "that's not how ecosystems work"...
Also, I never said vegans want to make wild animals vegan. If you didn't say I was antivegan I would have never mentioned vegans in the first place. I am not against vegans as I have already said literally one comment ago. I am under a post about feeding meat substitutes to predators, making fun of people who think we should feed meat substitutes to predators.
This is just factually wrong. Many people (often religious, but not necessarily and from various religions, not mostly, just often) base their view of the world on that idea. They probably won't say it out loud like that. We call people with this kind of ideas "conservatives" but of course that's not the whole thing, not all conservatives believe that, and it's not just about that, I'm making a very loose statement here.
I will stop commenting about the sexist part, honestly if after I explained everything of what I said you still don't get it, that's on you.
Edit: before you comment (because I know you will) when I wrote "[...] go eat vegan, but don't tell me [...]" that is not saying that vegans say animals should be vegans. That is addressed to you specifically, who are lecturing me that I'm anti-vegan for making fun of people who think we should feed meat substitutes to animals.
It's a tumblr post that simply claims that this was a fairly regular demand, which is bullshit. It's ragebait at the expense of vegans and almost the whole comment section here is falling for it.
The post isn't about feeding meat substitutes to predators. Synthetic meat is actual meat. Maybe try reading better before making fun of people?
Irrelevant argument, even if it's actual meat it only means that the carnivore diet is still meat. The role of the carnivore in the ecosystem (i.e. regulating the population of their prey) is still not covered, and the idea is still stupid
Sure, didn't mean to imply anything different. But if someone is saying something stupid, and you make fun of them for something different they haven't said, it makes you look even worse.