Hunting by Jan E. Dizard & Mary Zeiss Stange

Author:Jan E. Dizard & Mary Zeiss Stange [Dizard, Jan & Zeiss Stange, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

The ecological critique of hunting has a stronger case in Europe than it does in the United States.

Vera’s experiment promises to be instructive, but unlike the original landscape, which reproduced itself over thousands, if not millions, of years, the Oostvaardersplassen is too small and hemmed in by an intensively humanized landscape to ever be self-replicating. It will require sustained human management at least as intensive as anything the landed aristocracy did and as current professional wildlife managers do. And to make things more vexed, maintaining the menagerie that the Oostvaardersplassen has attracted has required culling. Indeed, in recent years Vera’s project has been mired in controversy. There have been large-scale die-offs of some species whose numbers could not be sustained on the reserve. Animal protectionists illegally brought in feed for the starving animals, as pictures of emaciated animals aroused public outrage. Vera was the target of death threats.4

Even where large space is available, as it is theoretically in the arid western United States, restoration requires management—and breeds controversy. Two proposals to carry out large-scale restoration projects in the West—one called the Buffalo Commons, proposing to let the prairie states return to the days when the “buffalo roamed,” and the other called Pleistocene Rewilding, bringing to the western plains proxies for the megafauna that went extinct some twelve thousand years ago—are Oostvaardersplassen on steroids.5 But restoration projects are not an answer to those who find management itself repugnant.

George Monbiot, a widely read British journalist who focuses on environmental issues, makes a case for letting nature take its course. Monbiot describes how he arrived at his current position. After getting a degree in ecology and working for the BBC’s natural history unit, he traveled abroad to West Papua, then Brazil, and then East Africa, where he saw a much less manicured and domesticated nature than was typical of England. He writes,

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