This is not surprising at all. For most of our history, most humans societies were only barely able to feed themselves. All growth in food supply was quickly matched by population growth. The population densities of hunter-gatherer societies were orders of magnitude lower than that of prehistoric agriculturalist, which resulted in latter displacing the former, and replacing their hunting grounds with farms and pastures.
This happened in the blink of an eye: in the area of modern Germany, anatomically modern human hunter gatherers have showed up something like 45-50 000 years ago, but after early European farmers have arrived from the southeast 7500 years ago, they entirely displaced the hunter gatherers in just 2000 years, despite the former having 42 000 years of head start (which is 7 times longer than the entire recorder history).
The reason is simple: using agriculture, you can have much more humans occupy the same area. You quickly get population counts that are completely impossible to sustain by hunting. If you nevertheless allow them to hunt, they will very quickly hunt the animal population to extinction, especially when most of the land is already used for cultivation instead of being dedicated for wildlife. We know this, because this happened on multiple occasions. Human arrivals to Australia have hunted most of its megafauna species to extinction. Same happened when humans arrived to Americas.
Point is, if you allow everyone to hunt, and hunters are numerous and adept, soon nobody is able to hunt, because there is nothing left to hunt. This is also happening today, with overfishing.
Small counter-point: The theory that the Clovis people hunted megafauna to extinction has been challenged a lot by recent research. It looks like North-American megafauna were actually quite likely driven extinct by changes to the climate. Analysis of the prevalence of fungal spores from large herbivore dung suggests that megafauna began going extinct in the northeastern parts of North America, and did so long before the Clovis people - who arrived from the west - would've been there to affect them.
Here's a very well-written article from 2020, from the respected D. Meltzer, that breaks down the evidence really concisely and cites most of the other literature I would point to: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015032117
All of that said, I agree with and want to add to your main point. We did see commercial hunting result in exactly the conditions you described in early American history. Actually, famous commercial hunters like Boone recognized that we were quickly losing the prevalence of wildlife (although it is likely that the prevalence was only there because of the recent demise of the majority of the Indian - and I use that word for the same reason as the author I'll cite - population that had been hunting them, see Charles Mann's "1491").
I find these theories attributing mass megafauna extinction to changes in climate rather unconvincing, for very simple reason: it would be an extreme coincidence that dozens of species that lived there for literally millions of years all just happened to go extinct right around when humans showed up.
Now, I certainly believe that climate changes at the time also played a role: for all we know, these might have even been responsible for most of the animal population reduction, through shrinking the habitat etc. But without the humans killing off the rest, they’d have survived, just like they did during climate changes for previous millions of years — it’s not like the climate just suddenly became unstable recently, after millions of years of high stability.
But yes, the overall point is that humans have produced cultural technology that made us just too good at hunting for it to be sustainable source of calories for majority of population, and this has already been true for many millennia.
I would encourage you to read the current literature. The evidence is more compelling than you might expect. Actually Meltzer’s 2020 paper (linked in my previous comment) touches on this exact concern under the subheading, “Getting past the Impasse”. There was another good paper that broke down how the end of the Pleistocene was radically different from previous glacial transitions and how the effects of that likely played into the extinctions. Combined with the revelation that most mammoth “kill sites” were actually more likely to be scavenged… it’s not at all an unlikely picture.
Thank you for recommendations. It’s been a while since I last skipped sleep to read on these topics, so maybe it is in fact time to catch up with recent ideas. My priors are still strong on humans being ultimately responsible, especially as the entire field is filled with a lot of wishful thinking about the noble nature of savage people, living in harmony with each other and environment.
I suspect it's a combination of both - climate change put the megafauna population under stress, and then humans showed up and dramatically exacerbated their woes.
The extinction of moa in New Zealand is entirely attributable to over-exploitation by humans. The extinction of megafauna in Australia seems to have been climate change + human hunting + human modification of the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming
> it would be an extreme coincidence that dozens of species that lived there for literally millions of years all just happened to go extinct right around when humans showed up.
Or, it could be that the same climate shift which allowed the humans to show up also was bad for the megafauna.
Hunting rifles almost never go bang, and it is pretty rare that a deer just falls over dead, yet if the two happen at the same time, it is hardly a coincidence.
The linked article might address this better than I have (I haven't read the article yet)
The humans have shown up many hundreds of thousands of years before the extinction of the megafauna, so these 2 events did not have the same cause.
While in the first part of the coexistence between hunting humans and big animals the extinction of various species was more gradual, in Africa and Eurasia, in more recent times the big animals have disappeared almost immediately (at geologic time scales) after the arrival of humans, e.g. in Australia, America and various big islands.
During hundreds of millions of years, there have been many extinction events, and the biggest animals have always been the most affected by them.
Nevertheless, soon after some big species became extinct, other previously smaller species have grown in size, to fill their place.
There has never been a time with a so low abundance of big animals as since the humans have spread all over the world, and it is obvious that no other big animals will emerge naturally, as the cultivated lands have left too little space for them.
The only way for some big terrestrial animals to appear again would be through genetic engineering and they could live only in reservations, like in Jurassic Park.
But it's not a coincidence - the climate conditions changing was what enabled humans to move into the continent. Still, I'd be surprised if human activity wasn't a significant contributor towards species extinction in this case.
While I agree to your point, there's one sentence that hits a pet peeve of mine:
> For most of our history, most humans societies were only barely able to feed themselves. All growth in food supply was quickly matched by population growth.
This, like most clichés isn't strictly wrong, but it's not very true either, at least for agrarian societies. Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside). And, at least in Western Europe, until the late middle ages there was a lot woodland completely fit for agriculture[1] that weren't exploited yet, leaving a huge margin for population to grow (and it did in fact, grow). So in most of the history of agriculture, again at least in Western Europe, population wasn't simply linked to the size of the potential food supply. It was probably much truer during the early modern period, when most woodland had been converted (even though the quick adaptation of the British agriculture during the continental blockade showed that there was again quite some margin there).
[1]: we know that they were fit for agriculture, because by the end of the middle ages, they were cultivated.
> Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside).
You are confusing an individual-level surplus with society wide one. It is true that a single farmer, with abundance of land, can produce great surplus of food, much more than he or his family is able to consume. However, on a society scale, there was very little surplus overall. In better years, food was quite sufficient for everyone, sure, but in worse years, people starved, especially children, elderly, and the destitute.
This is immediately obvious by looking at the population figures. The population growth everywhere was glacially slow by early modern standards, except when a group moved into previously unoccupied territory, or into territory occupied by groups with with worse food production technology.
Consider, for example, population growth in colonial America and in early decades of USA to population growth in UK. If UK population grew as fast as New England in years 1600-1800, by 1800 UK would have had something like 500 000 000 people (half a billion) living in it. Such rapid population growth was only possible in New England thanks to abundant land, very little of it has been previously used for cultivation by native Americans.
Or look, for example, at the rapid population growth in Africa today. Why hasn’t Africa ballooned to a billion people already in 1800, despite millions of years of head start? Simple: they simply couldn’t sustain populations so high with technologies available to them.
Given right circumstances, the population growth and fall are extremely fast on a historical scale, though it is hard to intuitively comprehend for humans due to us living on a single human lifetime scale.
Technological advances during the middle ages made more land fit for agriculture.
>> During the medieval ‘agricultural revolution’, new forms of cereal farming fuelled the exceptionally rapid growth of towns, markets and populations across much of Europe. The use of the mouldboard plough and systematic crop rotation were key developments and led to open-field farming, one of the transformative changes of the Middle Ages.
95% of the population could decide not to eat ocean fish and there'd still be enough natural demand to cause extinction. You can't solve this type of shared resource scarcity by asking individuals to abstain.
NZ is filled with mammals (and a few fish) that have a deleterious impact on native flora and fauna because the predominantly UK derived colonists wanted to build a more egalitarian society, and apparently the restriction of hunting or fishing for certain species to the wealthy in the UK was a key part of that.
So we got red deer, fallow deer, whitetail deer, samba deer, rusa deer, sika deer, chamois, tahr, salmon and trout.
And indeed, hunting them on public land is very egalitarian indeed, as is fishing for them - no such thing as a private river, although some landowners are attempting to privatise prime trout rivers by stealth.
In England, I think it can be a matter of buying the land either side of the river, but whether its owner controls navigation seems to be contested.
The UK Environment Agency says watercourses (including rivers) in England can be privately owned. [0]
British Canoeing seems to say that access to most navigable waterways in England is contested, including as trespass: "Of the 42,700 miles of inland waterways in England, only 1,400 miles can be paddled uncontested - that is a mere 4% of what is available. Paddlers are subject to challenge or dispute over their right to be on the water. ...If you are paddling on a river, lake or other waters where there is a disputed public right of navigation, then it could be alleged you may be trespassing." [1]
I think watercourses are a proper subset of waterways, with lakes being an example of waterways that aren't watercourses.
The right of owners to control fishing in England (and Wales) seems not to be contested in the way navigation is: "While the national rod licence gives a licence to fish anywhere in England and Wales, you might still need permission from the riparian owner to fish from her/his stretch of the river bank. The owner of the land adjoining one side of a natural river or stream owns the exclusive fishing rights (called, riparian rights) on her or his side of the bank. These rights extend up to the middle of the water. They can be leased or sold as separate property right (apart from ownership of the land itself). So, the owner does not necessarily have the right to fish from her/his side of the bank. An owner whose land adjoins a pond or lake has similar rights which extend as far as the middle of the water unless it encircles the pond or lake." [2]
Well, we have bugger all navigable waterways, even if a Kiwi did invent the modern jet-boat to increase the potential to navigate our braided rivers (in a rather small boat). [0]
In terms of rights to access rivers, it's complicated. There's the myth of the Queen's Chain [1], which has a kernel of truth in it, in very specific circumstances, but people had assumed it was far more broad reaching than it is.
And then there's the Ad Medium Filum Aquae (AMF) concept from English common law:
> By the common law, ownership of land adjoining a watercourse, which is not owned by the Crown, gives rise to the presumption that title extends to the middle line. It is a rebuttable presumption - that is, evidence to rebut (disprove) the presumption is always admissible.
That said, a lot of the riverbeds and banks of the larger (by our standards) rivers are owned by regional councils - we run three levels of government, central, regional, and local, and regional is the most focused on water allocations and flood management, so giving them ownership of the riverbeds and floodbanks around flood-prone rivers is a no-brainer - so AMF doesn't come up too often, but if you hunt for rabbits or similar, which love the braided riverbeds, then knowing where AMF applies and doesn't is vital to not meeting a grumpy farmer.
Unlike (what I've been told about) the UK, no-one can actually own the fishing rights to a river, nor the fish in the river. But you can own the land neighbouring it.
And yeah, that's how you privatise a river - buy land on both sides of the river from farmers who had previously reached an agreement with the Department of Conservation or similar to allow angler access via specified routes, and then rescind that access.
Of course, you can claim that you're not privatising the river because _technically_ the prime trout fishing stretch that your land now surrounds can be accessed via a hike upstream from Crown land that only takes 3 days one way.
I mean technically, yes, it's not privatised, but realistically, it pretty much is.
That said, the Crown is getting smarter about this, and is focusing more on permanent easements instead of relying on the goodwill of land owners - especially when rich American celebrities start buying up large high country farms, they tend to be rather... ...private, and thus averse to the public continuing to cross their land.
Always been fascinating to me as an American to see how hunting and shooting gear is marketed and sold in Europe. It’s closer to luxury goods retail than the American experience where it’s all generally treated as sporting equipment no matter if it’s at a “luxury” price point.
Same country where you can also hunt on anyone's private land, except if they placed a no-hunting sign every few meter, which they also have to update each year..
according to you, I like cheap ammo, mostly .22 so I can practice. I do not have time (haven't) to even get into reloading. And who cares about the price or how hard it is. You know how easy it is to get a crossbow and spikes? Do you think you need a special license for that? More deadly, way more quiet, untraceable, I mean you can go on yet we talk about climate change now? Stay on point please
> Do you think you need a special license for that?
Crossbows and bows do need a license where I live. You can use them only on a special target practice place. The law also regulates how you should transport the bows to your home (you have to unhook its string). The license for a bow requires a training course and everyone can take those. Guns are obviously much more restricted.
I believe that is fine. I understand that this might sound crazy to someone who has grown up being able to buy guns at the grocery store. To me that sounds crazy.
Got it, interesting...well we agree, there are dangerous things out there if someone wants u...broken bottle getting out if the car..come on. Univ of Fairbanks had a gun room fornus to keep our rifles locked up while at college. Different strokes but notbody saying safety isn't paramount. I want firearms safety courses in public school. avaiable anytime anywhere
> I do not have time (haven't) to even get into reloading.
Can I ask what 'reloading' is? I'm guessing it's making your own ammo yourself, yes? I'm curious to know more, if you (or anyone else) wouldn't mind sharing.
"I don't have time to reload" sounds like you're just throwing the entire gun away instead of putting more bullets into it but that can't be right (although I could see someone doing this in an action movie :) )
> I'm guessing it's making your own ammo yourself, yes?
Yes. It's mainly done for two reasons: cost and performance.
If you use a lot of ammo you can reduce your net costs. Depending on what you shoot the cost savings can be substantial, especially if your firearm is not a common type.
You can achieve higher performance (accuracy, power, etc.) as well. Refining the 'load' (primer, powder and bullet are the main variables) to a particular firearm, as well as precisely controlling materials and assembly, can improve accuracy.
Lately, availability has also become a motivator. Ammo scarcity can sometimes be worked around by acquiring components and assembling them yourself.
Anyhow, it's a common pursuit and a continuation of historical practice; at one time everyone made all of their own ammo. The downsides are the time and equipment necessary, including space to accommodate it all, which needs to be dry and clear of unrelated traffic, and the possibility of injuring or killing yourself or others if you do it wrong.
I've done it and it suits geek type mentalities; a multidimensional optimization problem involving obscure knowledge and refinement. It's quite a thrill to touch off a round you designed and assembled.
yea, just google reloading kit. People want to reuse the expensive part of a bullet for whatever reason. Brass is $$ and having a company like federal fill to your specific requrements can get expensive!
Over here in Romania there are still pockets of "common people" going hunting, but they're on their way out, it has slowly become a rich person activity.
It’s become less egalitarian over my lifetime. When I was a kid, my working class dad and a few buddies would rent a deer lease each year, doing maintenance work in the summer and fall, then going out over the weekend in season. These deer leases were usually part of a ranch.
They lost their last one because the heirs were uninterested in ranching and sold to someone much wealthier in Dallas who wanted it just for hunting. They weren’t able to find a similar situation because ranches were getting bought up by other wealthier hunters.
on the other hand, since a lot of predators animals in France have been hunted to extinction there, in certain areas hunting is used to keep the population of certain wild animals in check
I think you're assuming the culture around hunting is the same in france as in the place you're from but it isn't really. The class connotations are almost flipped from the US, it's much more of "rural gentry" thing than what you're thinking of.
This is wild. Is the land very flat? At least in my state, you’re required to complete a Hunter education course and pass a written, proctored exam starting at age 12. It was at least 75% safety.
We were taught to always know what we’re shooting at and what’s behind what we’re shooting at. You would lose your license if you shot a fawn, even if it were an accident, simply because saying it was an accident meant you clearly couldn’t see it. We were also taught how far a high-powered rifle round can travel. We wouldn’t even shoot up ridges.
If what you’re saying is true, then the only explanations I can think of is that either people shouldn’t be hunting there because of geography or these hunting rules and regulations around safety are garbage.
France seems to have a similar rate of hunting deaths to the USA.
> According to information released by the International Hunter Education Association, the U.S. and Canada combined see around 1,000 hunting accidents, specifically involving shooting injuries, on an annual basis. Moreover, close to 10% of these hunting accidents end in death.
> Since 2000, there have been 3,325 hunting accidents in France, of which 421 were fatal, figures from l'Office français de la biodiversité and la Fédération nationale de la chasse show.
> This is equivalent to 158 accidents per year, with 20 deaths.
France is just under 1/5 the population of USA and Canada combined. Perhaps it’s just that firearm deaths are so much more common in the USA (12.21/100k vs 2.33/100k) the hunting deaths are less notable
US may have 5x the population, but hunting is far more popular in the US - you have approximately 16M people in the US hunting per year, but only 1.3M in France. So it's more like 10x instead of 5x. On top of that, I suspect that in the US, hunters hunt more than hunters in France, so the total number of hunting hours might end up being 20x in the US vs France.
The US has roughly the same # of hunting deaths per year despite a much larger population. The US stats also include things like heart attacks and falling out of tree stands, dunno if French #s are comparable? If you look at injury rates per participant, hunting (5 injuries per 10,000 participants) is roughly on par with bowling (6 per 10k participants) and well behind golf (15) and tennis (16).
I don't think it would actually be the case: Banning hunting as a hobby would be a massive win.
There is an artificial imbalance in the ecosystems introduced by hunters who feed specific animals at certain times in order to have more, and thus easier to hunt, preys. Because of that, there is a need to restore a viable ecosystem in some areas.
This kind of thing should not be let to the "elite", but to professionals...
Hunting is usually well regulated in most places, with professional biologists watching the game animal populations and assigning the number of hunting tags to keep the populations in balance. Here in Massachusetts, the places we have the most problem with deer populations is in the east, where anti-hunting sentiment is high. The deer are overpopulated, unbalancing the ecosystem, and leading to all kinds of issues such as tick infestation, car accidents, and stress on some native plants, not to mention less healthy deer.
A state has an asset. They can assess the population of a certain animal, assess its growth rate, assess the impact it can have, both to human populations and to the ecosystem, and determine how many need to be culled each year to prevent negative impacts.
Now it has a choice. It can get people to pay to do it for them, or of can tax you and pay someone to do it. They can consider the animals assets or liabilities.
A government that would turn something very valuable from a source of revenue to an expense is an incompetent government full of bumbling idiots that have no business governing a territory of natural resources or a population of human beings.
You wish - the pestilential whitetail deer multiply without anyone's help and destroy tree seedlings and even peoples' gardens. When you encounter skeletal deer that look as if they has escaped Auschwitz you know that hunting increases animal welfare.
Hmm. Where I am there are a number of "Deer Feed" sellers and the buyers bring large trucks. Serious hunters do indeed attract animals with food.
In general you're correct, most hunters don't. But some hunters -- particularly the ones that hunt the most -- do feed prey. On the high end of that histogram are people that acquire property in communities that are designed to accommodate hunters. They feed a lot of game.
Its like fish bait. You set these feeders out to get them to hang around an area so that when you're ready to hunt you have an easier time finding them. Hunters don't feed anything near the amount of food mass needed to increase the wild population, this idea of an ecological imbalance due to feeding is wildly inaccurate, its like saying fishermen increase fish stocks with fish bait.
> this idea of an ecological imbalance due to feeding is wildly inaccurate
That is likely the case. General farming on behalf of human consumption is likely to be an order of magnitude greater impact on whatever "ecological imbalances" you care to measure.
Humans have been "imbalancing" ecologies thus for a long time.
I always found that interesting about the opera "Der Freischütz". It's from 1821, but its portrayal of hunting is surprisingly egalitarian. The main character is a minor nobleman who is terrible at hunting, the opera starts with a commoner being celebrated for winning a hunting competition and ribbing the main character gently for it. The commoner talks about the hunting stories his grandmother told him, too. So commoners hunting couldn't have been implausible to German audiences in 1821, even in quite stratified society.
luckily I can still hunt where ever I am at, in Alaska, in CT picking off a bunny my daughter helped me skin, a fly in my palm or an idiot on the internet. How are they controlling anything about the way I hunt or pick ip roadkill to eat?
And they will keep attempting to do so until they succeed or we have a circulation of elites. It will be a pincer movement between increasing prices for hunting gear and restricting access to licenses, parks, etc with the cherry on top of using media to pounce on hunters ala Walter Palmer & Cecil the Lion.
This happened in the blink of an eye: in the area of modern Germany, anatomically modern human hunter gatherers have showed up something like 45-50 000 years ago, but after early European farmers have arrived from the southeast 7500 years ago, they entirely displaced the hunter gatherers in just 2000 years, despite the former having 42 000 years of head start (which is 7 times longer than the entire recorder history).
The reason is simple: using agriculture, you can have much more humans occupy the same area. You quickly get population counts that are completely impossible to sustain by hunting. If you nevertheless allow them to hunt, they will very quickly hunt the animal population to extinction, especially when most of the land is already used for cultivation instead of being dedicated for wildlife. We know this, because this happened on multiple occasions. Human arrivals to Australia have hunted most of its megafauna species to extinction. Same happened when humans arrived to Americas.
Point is, if you allow everyone to hunt, and hunters are numerous and adept, soon nobody is able to hunt, because there is nothing left to hunt. This is also happening today, with overfishing.