At 11:40 AM 2/29/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Animal RIGHTS people are coming from the Enlightenment
>tradition of personal RIGHTS. PERIOD
Like all moral decisions, most are not so cut and dry, as one decision does
only harm and another does only good. Soon, we human beings will have to
sacrifice some reproductive freedom ourselves. Not just about abortion, but
number of children per couple. China, (that horrible evil country), has had to
face these decisions sooner than the West, as their society was thousands of
years old, when Europeans were just beginning to annihilate the Native
American human and non-human population.
Predictions are for the population in the U.S. to approach 500 million midway
through the 21st century. If deer lacked habitat before, it will most all be
occupied by humans then. Of course, another pseudo-deer population explosion
will be invented, and the philanthropic hunters will offer their services to
the rest of us. I venture to say that most humans, and deer alike would
rather render some degree of choice in how many dozen offspring we create, in
order to preclude a situation where we would be killed because there are too
many of "our kind". Painful, inconvenient, frightening might any form of
contraception be, but certainly better than a bullet in the head or an arrow
embedded in the abdomen. Just as human contraception used to be fraught with
many side effects, with time and willingness to work through the problems, it
would be become less traumatic for deer populations, (and hopefully other
animals that are brutally killed in the most barbaric traps).
I have had similar reservations,(about immunocontraception), but still feel
it would save
them much more suffering than hunting them to control their numbers. Just as
some people predict that human population may plataeu at some pleasant level,
there have been studies that show that as food supply gradually decreases that
fertility will decline comparably, without any starvation, (of course some
pretty scrawny deer). That said, I believe we should try to develop oral
contraception for deer, that could be put in feed at feeding stations, that
would only be used when population density reached a critical number. The
biggest obstacle is,(ironically!), that hunters themselves, have opposed oral
contraception, since the deer would not be marked, and then heaven forbid they
might get "some hormones" in the victim that they slay.
"As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower
beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men
massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the
seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love"
-Pythagorus
"All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life.
See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?"
-Buddha
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for
survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian
diet"
-Albert Einstein
"He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man..." -Isaiah 66:3
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