this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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How do you feel about "this animal has to be culled for the good of the ecosystem, and incidentally makes good eating"?
Where I live, Australia, we have the issue that kangaroos have few predators (dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles have to attack in groups to even bring down one (plus both are rare nowadays and prefer to poach farm animals now anyway) and the predators who could have soloed a kangaroo, like thylacoleo, megalania, and quinkana, are all 40000 years extinct, give or take), but they still breed like animals expecting to meet their end to some manner of predator. So in place of the predators that would usually keep their numbers down, hunting quotas are used to keep their numbers at an appropriate level. And as a side effect of this, a large amount of kangaroo meat enters the market, because they're not exactly small animals and they're perfectly edible.
We also have issues with feral pigs, rabbits, cats, camels and horses (among other animals, most of which are either too small to eat and/or have horrible fucking toxins in their flesh) that should not be here at all, given the horrific amount of damage they do to the native ecosystem on account of evolving in a far more competitive environment. The end goal is that they all fucking die, so it's not a totally sustainable business to hunt them for meat, plus the pigs and rabbits are disease-ridden (some of which we gave them in order to achieve the objective of total eradication) and the public has issues with eating cat meat, but we could totally do the same with the camels and horses, at least until the feral populations cease existing.
I always find this kind of thought process fascinating because I'm also australian and as aussies we use much more than our fair share of resources in this planet. We pollute excessively, drive cars that are much too large, have excessively large homes and use ridiculous amounts of energy. I don't belong in our ecosystem, my ancestors were brought over by the english same as the bunnies, cats and foxes. Well half the line anyway, the other half is a more recent transplant from post war Poland.
So uhhh I'm pretty sure I'm fucking terrible for the environment, and odds are you are too. Here's the sticky point though: I actually don't want to die. I would be pretty fucking upset if you told me I had to get culled to preserve ecosystem balance and prevent "overhousing" of bushland or whatever. Now the way I see it, any right I might have to exist unmolested is predicated on the notion that sentient beings' desire to live matters, that while I'm not free to do whatever I like and have some responsibility to try and mitigate the harm to others I cause by being alive I am allowed to be alive.
So I'd ask you: why is it OK to shoot kangaroos but not humans? Why are we special? I think I have a life a little more complex than a kangaroo but I'm just guessing and that's scary anyway because some humans might have more complex lives than me, and some less (e.g. the very young, old, or people with brain injuries) and that seems like a fucked up to all hell calculus to start doing. The kangaroos seem to want to keep being alive, I mean they eat, drink, run away when people start shooting them (the few that jump in front of traffic might be suicidal I'll pay that but we can't know).
Also like, those kangaroos are a way lower ecological load than idk all the animal ag we have and we actually have a way to reduce that load without murder. We can just stop breeding them! A plant based agriculture would be much less hard on the land which would allow us a lot more time to find some other way to manage populations, the same compassion we extend to ourselves! Maybe we could teach them about birth control, or less flippantly maybe we could reduce fertility somehow.
Shit maybe the only way for the next little while is killing but that doesn't mean each death is ethical. They didn't do anything wrong, it's just doing a mass murder to avoid a complete murder and tbh if we think we're being reasonable we ought to be completely comfortable applying the same reasoning to ourselves and I see absolutely nobody signing up eagerly to be population controlled.