"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...


Fascinating that such a tremendous population of birds can be maintained
where hunters can legally sell their game. Here in Wisconsin, and in
most,
if not all, of the U.S. (as far as I know) such practices are strictly
forbidden and violations are met with very severe fines and even jail
time.
All this for good reason; more than one species (passenger pigeons come
readily to mind) were driven to extinction by market hunting, and numerous
others (bison, for example) to the brink. Were the practice still allowed
here, Bubba would exterminate anything and everything even remotely
edible......not to mention many other things that aren't. We are nothing,
if not effective killers.


That's for sure, although I don't think "Bubba" (being, I assume, a
euphemism for a rural dweller of limited global awareness) is primarily at
fault. I think its more "Winston P. Railbaron III and Associates" who has
the resources and drive, and who inspires Bubba to buy a case of shotgun
shells with a promise of an easy payday for a day out hunting. Americans in
particular seem overly willing to blindly overconsume (or overproduce, or
over-mine, or over-harvest) when it involves personal gain. Maybe it has to
do with our Capitalist ideals: the thought that these things are essentially
inexhaustible raw material for generating personal wealth, and an associated
belief that it's essentially better to develop these resources than it is to
let them 'go to waste'. A type of environmental Manifest Destiny, if you
will. (I hear there's a good book out there called "Dominion", or something
like that, which deals with exactly this.)

I appreciate the ratrace idea that we all can attain disproportionate
personal wealth (in fact, I regularly hope for it), but the basis for that
wealth has to come from somewhere.... In the Scandahoovian countries, which
are socialist, there are two essential differences to our American
mentalities: everyone is provided for at a reasonable minimum standard
(which greatly reduces the "get it before its too late" attitude), and there
is an associated belief that nature is our friend (as opposed to American's
essential fear of nature, and our view of it as something to be 'conquered'
or subdued). Where the American psyche is filled with ideas of the historic
"untamed West", and the "brutal savages" and dangerous animals who live
there, the European psyche has given us the ideals of the preserved
wilderness, and the rural countryfolk who dwell in harmony with nature
(imagine what Grimm's Fairy Tales would look like if they were written by a
resident of NYC).

The last time I headed out into unexplored countryside for several days, my
urbanized american friends expressed horror that I was endangering myself by
going 'out into nature' alone, and wasn't I scared?? And all of my rural
friends (american and european) expressed envy and asked how much fun it
was. The idea of being surrounded by wild beests is anathema to the average
american, and sheer protected joy to the average Scanahoovian, AFAIK.

--riverman