Erik in AK
New member
Hey all,
This is a continuance of "Deleted Posts" in SPORTSMANS ISSUES. I referenced an article I read in RMEF Bugle in Mar-Apr 2000 issue.
If I may digress a little...some background on what a quality organization RMEF is. I went to the RMEF site after Ithaca asked about a link. Well the back issue archive only goes back a year but there was a 1(800) # so I called and was referred to Bob Raub the RMEF webmaster he did some research and emailed me the article in its entirety which I have pasted below.
Its very thought provoking.
Enjoy and Cheers!
Erik
Women and Children First: Killing Bambi
by David Petersen
Bambi must die.
I'm not talking Hollywood hokum, though the Disney cartoon movie has certainly planted a bumper crop of antihunting seeds in the minds of children during the past half-century. But what I'm talking about is biological imperative, and maybe even the future of big game management in North America.
Bambi must die because a high percentage of Bambis-that is, all infant creatures of the deer family-are destined to die young. This is not opinion, but rock-hard reality. Like it or not, most Bambis die within the first few months of their lives. While I don't like it much-the suffering and death attendant to all life-I'm learning at least to acknowledge natural reality and the evolutionary wisdom it implies.
It seems to me that nature "intends" or "selects" infant wild ungulates to suffer a high mortality rate, with much of that mortality owing to focused predation during the spring calving/fawning season. All my reading and personal observations suggest that winterkill, starvation, disease, parasites, and especially predation-essentially all the natural killers save human hunters-gang up on cervid young. Yet all this "baby killing" continues, century upon millennium, without the prey population base being eroded. Herd composition actually seems to be positively influenced by high infant mortality. So an "intentional" excess seems to have evolved in wild cervid reproduction, with most of this surplus of infant flesh going to feed predators and scavengers.
I see this scheme in action when I watch local mule deer does birth twin fawns each June, one of which is usually bear-scat within a month. Besides bears, we have cougars, coyotes, bobcats, foxes and eagles, all of them with young of their own to feed. This leads me to wonder if evolution has deemed twins as the norm for deer so that one fawn-the stronger, quicker, or merely more fortunate-can be assured of escape while its sacrificial sibling occupies the predator.
A similar force seems at work among elk, with their naturally high cow/calf ratio. In response, witness the incredibly concentrated predation-by grizzlies, black bears, wolves, cougars and coyotes-on infant elk calves at Yellowstone National Park during the annual mid-May to mid-June calving season. Yet Yellowstone wapiti thrive.
But I'm just a layman hunter, long on questions and opinions and short on answers and facts. So I posed this pair of questions to Valerius Geist, one of the world's most respected authorities on wild ungulates: Do you believe that cervids have evolved to produce excess young in response to and "in service of" their coevolutionary predators? And if so, should wildlife managers emulate nature by redesigning hunting seasons to put more emphasis on killing calves and fawns, and compensate by reducing hunting pressure on mature males?
This is his response:
Dear David,
I have argued that no hunter should be legally allowed to shoot an adult cervid until he or she has handed in the jaws of 10 infants! I have also proposed that over-the-counter hunting licenses be restricted to calves and fawns-period. Not even "antlerless." Limited cow/doe, bull/buck licenses would be available by lottery. Neither did I make these arguments in jest, having "wasted" my own precious hunting tags every so often on infant cervids to indicate that I mean what I preach.
The fact is that calves and fawns suffer a high mortality on the way to growing into competent adults. Generally, only a small fraction will succeed. That fraction, on average, is two out of 10 calves or fawns born to a female cervid across her reproductive life. In cause-and-effect terms, the high birth rate is both the consequence and ultimate cause of the high mortality.
That is, over hundreds of thousands of years, females that produced one calf or two fawns per year were able to maintain their genes in the population. Those that put out fewer young did not.
You need not invoke some cosmic principle that cervids are born to feed myriads of predators-although, factually, that's perfectly correct. Cervid flesh makes predators. Deer, which tend to twin, have suffered, on average, higher predation historically than have elk and other species that bear only one young.
However, if you weigh mother and young at birth, you may discover that both the mothers of twins (deer, moose) and singles (elk, bison) in terms of foetal weight relative to the mother's body mass, produce exactly the same birth mass! For an instance, moose and bison cows weigh virtually the same. Bison normally produce one 35-pound calf, while moose generally make two 17-pound twins. While elk do it in one package (single calf), mule deer prefer two (twin fawns).
One can play with this phenomenon, as I have done, to show that foetal mass at birth reflects predation pressure and adaptation to that pressure. What is crucial is that most calves/fawns will soon die. Only the luckiest and best (fittest) will survive. Therefore, either hunters or Mother Nature can take them. By contrast, healthy adult cervids have low mortality rates from predation and winter.
Thus, the logical harvesting strategy is to take calves or fawns during the fall hunting seasons, before winter can waste them, compensating with a lowering of the adult kill quota.
Such a scheme generates, on average, an older population of females who, because of their age and acquired experience, make much better mothers, producing larger, healthier and more young, while better protecting them against predation. Additionally, being better acquainted with where to feed, older moms produce richer milk in greater quantities, leading to superior body growth and survival of their offspring.
This higher-young, lower-adult harvest is the cervid management strategy I favor. It's also the strategy used to manage moose in Sweden, with wonderful results.
In short, a population of cervids in which females live well into maturity-say, eight to 12 years-will produce far more calves or fawns, so that either more hunters can participate or more calf/fawn permits can be given out per hunter. And wild predators win as well. Moreover, on average, hunters who take infants rather than adults are harvesting much better quality table meat, leading to a heightened enthusiasm among their spouses for the hunt!
At the same time, by "keeping our fingers off" bulls and bucks, we get an adult population with a high male/female ratio-a natural sex ratio. Now miracles begin to happen: The rut is advanced and shortened. Young are born earlier in the spring and across a shorter time. Ergo: a shorter "spread" of vulnerability to predation and more time to grow large before winter, resulting in fewer young lost to carnivores and winterkill.
Another benefit of a high mature-male ratio is that with more big boys about, more "young bucks" drop out of the breeding. These youngsters then can save their precious fat stores for winter. Consequently: better male survival. Additionally, these unhappily celibate young males will have fewer, if any, rutting-battle wounds to heal. They can, therefore, stick their caloric reserves into improved body and antler growth the following spring. In this way, when not heavily harvested, bulls and bucks, relative to females, not only become more numerous but larger in body and antler mass as well.
In this scenario-more hunting of calves and fawns, less hunting of mature bulls and bucks-hunters soon will start seeing lots of big males. If they wait their turn and are drawn by lottery, they will be able to go out and likely get a very nice trophy. Meanwhile, they are hunting calves and fawns and bringing home the finest meat.
Additionally, if this management scheme is used for mule deer, invading whitetails have little chance of breeding with estrus mule deer does, as those does will virtually always be defended by a big buck, and white-tailed bucks avoid large muley bucks. Thus, management in favor of producing mature bucks reduces the chances of white-tailed deer gradually "taking over" mule deer populations through hybridization, as they currently are doing in parts of the Canadian and American West.
Focusing the annual cervid kill on fawns and calves is a winner in every respect!
Sincerely,
Val Geist
A curious concept, at first blush. But in fact, it's a logical restatement of the old axiom of "quality over quantity." We can have better trophy hunting via less trophy hunting.
After having my musings bolstered by Dr. Geist, I ran them past the critical ears of Colorado bowhunter, wildlife biologist and hunting ethicist Tom Beck. Here is Beck's response, all the more impressive in that it was offered without foreknowledge of what Geist had to say:
Well Dave, it's as simple as this: Most of each year's crop of calves and fawns will die before they see a second spring, and the primary killer is winter. Therefore, if you hunt them in the fall, you're hardly affecting the infant-death dynamics at all. What we're talking about here is compensatory mortality-the fact that most cervid young are going to die within a few months anyhow, making them biological supernumeraries-so we might as well hunt them, then compensate by curtailing the harvest of genetically essential adult males. In this way, without reducing herd numbers, we can improve both age and gender ratios, more closely imitating the conditions of natural selection.
And in all age categories, with both deer and elk, we need to be killing more females and fewer males.
Dale McCullough, who's done extensive herd-density research with mule and black-tailed deer, presents a clear and convincing argument that we don't want the maximum number of cervids on a given range, as we often get with current management paradigms favoring male-only hunting. Say you have a range that can "support" a thousand cervids. With male-only hunting, you'll eventually wind up with a radically skewed sex ratio. What's more, with the range being cropped at maximum carrying capacity, both flora and fauna are severely stressed.
To escape this trap, you have to reduce the number of females, so that the survivors will have better nutrition, leading to more and bigger young, along with a higher percentage of male births. Although we don't understand the precise dynamics of it, well-nourished cervids tend to produce more male young than female.
Additionally, with a healthier range operating at less than full carrying capacity, you get a higher first-winter survival rate for infants. This is a very compelling argument for hunting females and young instead of mature males, and why I almost never kill a bull or buck.
Even should we stop all hunting, as the animal rights folks would like, the ratio of male to female cervids will never return to normal and healthy unless a lot of females are somehow removed from the population. A primary reason for this is that every time you get a hard winter, the males-being nutritionally stressed and maybe wounded from the fall rut-are the first to die.
Therefore, the very concept of "carrying capacity," as interpreted by livestock ranchers and most wildlife managers, is misleading and harmful, in that you obtain optimum herd balance and health when a range is utilized at below its ecological carrying capacity. Rather than maximum carrying capacity, we should be managing for optimal carrying capacity. And the only way we can achieve that is to emphasize the hunting of females and young.
The genetic imperative for all life is to reproduce itself. Under relentless predatory pressure, evolution naturally favors the gene strains of those individuals who produce larger numbers of young. Were it not for countless millennia spent living under heavy infant-predation pressure, deer might never have evolved to the present norm of having twins, or elk to one calf almost every year. But because, genetically, they "know" they'll be losing most of their young, cervids have "learned" to produce more-an excess large enough to compensate for predation, winterkill and other "baby" killers.
For all these reasons and more, in most situations, were it possible to make the distinction, the primary hunter's target-from biological, ecological and evolutionary points of view; and thus from an ethical perspective as well-should be female calves and fawns.
Indeed. All points considered, it's not only Bambi who must die for the good of his kind, but his doe-eyed girlfriend Faline as well-even especially.
In a memorable essay titled "In the Snow Queen's Palace," Mary Zeiss Stange recalled a meat hunt she and her husband, both then in grad school and poor, shared the day before Thanksgiving out on the frozen, wind-scoured plains of eastern Montana in the record-breaking cold winter of 1985.
Early in their hunt, she writes:
. . . after several hundred yards of crunching through ice-encrusted grass, we sprinted along a fenceline toward the creek bed. Skidding down an embankment . . . we were suddenly brought up short by what lay ahead: a little fawn, curled as if asleep, snugly nestled in the snow drifted against a fencepost. The tiny deer was frozen solid . . . Doug knelt and stroked the fawn affectionately, as one might a cat or dog found napping by the woodstove . . . A little death like this could not go unmarked, unmourned.
Farther along, the couple encounters a group of deer clustered in a patch of woods, too cold and winter-weak even to run away as the hunters approach. These pitiful creatures were "trapped by their instinct to survive." Stange says, "In such a situation, shooting was impossible."
Exchanging "a quick glance and a wordless nod," she and her husband turned and walked away. Finally, as their hunt was about to end, Mary and Doug spotted some deer at the far end of the field:
No more than indistinct shapes, they appeared and disappeared, phantoms in the now thinly falling snow. With the wind in our favor, and the snow as much camouflage for us as for them, we proceeded along the fence until we were perhaps two hundred yards away. Steadying my .30-06 on a fencepost, I focused the scope on a doe, another doe, a fawn, another fawn. Teeth chattering and my right hand burning with cold . . . I thought quickly about the fawn we had seen curled peacefully in the snow, about those deer paralyzed for sheer survival in the trees. "I'm taking the one farthest to the left," I whispered to Doug, who was also aiming his rifle. I placed the crosshairs for a heart shot, and fired. His shot came an instant later. We had killed the two fawns.
Soon after Stange's essay appeared in Sports Afield, the magazine's letters column bristled with outrage, accusing Stange of being a heartless baby-killer and glorifying her blood-lust in print. But as director of women's studies at Skidmore College and author of Woman the Hunter, Stange is hardly your run-of-the-mill sexist pig or redneck hunter. What her critics missed is that had she and her husband killed the two does, both fawns would certainly have died as well, due to their inexperience in finding food and shelter and the severity of the winter. Even had the hunters killed nothing, statistical probability predicts that both youngsters would have succumbed to winterkill.
Of course, the Stanges could have killed one doe/fawn pair, thus preserving the other "family unit." But then, the one spared fawn would likely soon have died, leaving only one doe to reproduce herself come spring. By killing both of the fawns and sparing both of the does, they had gotten some excellent meat without harming either the post-winter population or the reproductive potential of the local herd.
There can be little doubt that human predators have been killing Bambis from the beginning. This was brought home to me this past late May, while enjoying an evening walk with my good dog Otis. As we slipped
quietly along a game trail through a green tunnel of aspens, an elk cow rose suddenly and silently just 20 yards ahead. We stopped short (from long practice in the presence of large wildlife, Otis knows the drill), and the cow just stared.
Figuring the cow had a calf stashed nearby, and not wishing to disturb them further, we did an about-face to backtrack out of there. Within a few steps, Otis detected what we'd both missed on the way in: a tiny spotted elk calf curled beside a mossy log just a few feet off the trail.
Too young to run away and instinctively paralyzed by what biologists call the "hider strategy," the calf just lay there, moving only its big brown eyes. I quietly called Otis back-he only wanted to sniff the furry little bundle, but even that was too much-and we made ourselves scarce. But had I wanted the calf that Otis and I had stumbled upon, it would have been as simple as stepping up and whacking it on the head with a club or rock, no more difficult than clouting a fool hen.
Long before ancestral humans developed the tools and skills of true hunters, they doubtless included the capture of infant animals in their foraging strategies. Just as all four-legged predators do yet today. Of course, no "sporting" hunter would consider "murdering" a "helpless" 40-pound spotted calf. But by fall and hunting season, that same calf will weigh some 200 pounds-as big as a big deer-and be anything but helpless.
In a report titled "Results of Special Calf-Only Hunting Seasons in the East Kootenay Region of British Columbia," researchers Raymond A. Demarchi and Anna J. Wolterson observe that:
The strategy of maximizing calf harvest may be difficult for some hunters to accept. However, it is our experience that if explained that calf harvests form the basis of both the cattle ranching industry and natural [wild] ungulate population regulation, most hunters will agree with the concept. Hunters in the East Kootenay have demonstrated a willingness to harvest calves when directed. [More than] nine years of experience . . . have proven that calf elk hunting is an effective management regime in regulating elk population structure and numbers while increasing recreational hunting opportunities.
Of course, it's one thing to intellectualize about the biological wisdom of killing "supernumerary" young and females while allowing more mature males to live and reproduce, and quite another to bring that wisdom to the field. Like so many others, I may never completely rid myself of big-antler compulsion, especially regarding elk. Once you're out there-the bugling, the rut-stench, those antlers-everything changes. To most of us, elk hunting means bull hunting.
It's in the blood, we could say, and one hell of an urge to try and overcome. But someday, it may just have to be, if not by free choice, then by regulation. For now, if for no better reason than an experiment in personal will and self-control, I have reason to try. This next elk season, my trophy of choice will be Bambi.
David Petersen hunts, guides and writes from his home in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. His most recent book is Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World (Johnson Books, 1998).
--------------------------------------------------------
Bob Raup
Webmaster
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
406-523-4578
This is a continuance of "Deleted Posts" in SPORTSMANS ISSUES. I referenced an article I read in RMEF Bugle in Mar-Apr 2000 issue.
If I may digress a little...some background on what a quality organization RMEF is. I went to the RMEF site after Ithaca asked about a link. Well the back issue archive only goes back a year but there was a 1(800) # so I called and was referred to Bob Raub the RMEF webmaster he did some research and emailed me the article in its entirety which I have pasted below.
Its very thought provoking.
Enjoy and Cheers!
Erik
Women and Children First: Killing Bambi
by David Petersen
Bambi must die.
I'm not talking Hollywood hokum, though the Disney cartoon movie has certainly planted a bumper crop of antihunting seeds in the minds of children during the past half-century. But what I'm talking about is biological imperative, and maybe even the future of big game management in North America.
Bambi must die because a high percentage of Bambis-that is, all infant creatures of the deer family-are destined to die young. This is not opinion, but rock-hard reality. Like it or not, most Bambis die within the first few months of their lives. While I don't like it much-the suffering and death attendant to all life-I'm learning at least to acknowledge natural reality and the evolutionary wisdom it implies.
It seems to me that nature "intends" or "selects" infant wild ungulates to suffer a high mortality rate, with much of that mortality owing to focused predation during the spring calving/fawning season. All my reading and personal observations suggest that winterkill, starvation, disease, parasites, and especially predation-essentially all the natural killers save human hunters-gang up on cervid young. Yet all this "baby killing" continues, century upon millennium, without the prey population base being eroded. Herd composition actually seems to be positively influenced by high infant mortality. So an "intentional" excess seems to have evolved in wild cervid reproduction, with most of this surplus of infant flesh going to feed predators and scavengers.
I see this scheme in action when I watch local mule deer does birth twin fawns each June, one of which is usually bear-scat within a month. Besides bears, we have cougars, coyotes, bobcats, foxes and eagles, all of them with young of their own to feed. This leads me to wonder if evolution has deemed twins as the norm for deer so that one fawn-the stronger, quicker, or merely more fortunate-can be assured of escape while its sacrificial sibling occupies the predator.
A similar force seems at work among elk, with their naturally high cow/calf ratio. In response, witness the incredibly concentrated predation-by grizzlies, black bears, wolves, cougars and coyotes-on infant elk calves at Yellowstone National Park during the annual mid-May to mid-June calving season. Yet Yellowstone wapiti thrive.
But I'm just a layman hunter, long on questions and opinions and short on answers and facts. So I posed this pair of questions to Valerius Geist, one of the world's most respected authorities on wild ungulates: Do you believe that cervids have evolved to produce excess young in response to and "in service of" their coevolutionary predators? And if so, should wildlife managers emulate nature by redesigning hunting seasons to put more emphasis on killing calves and fawns, and compensate by reducing hunting pressure on mature males?
This is his response:
Dear David,
I have argued that no hunter should be legally allowed to shoot an adult cervid until he or she has handed in the jaws of 10 infants! I have also proposed that over-the-counter hunting licenses be restricted to calves and fawns-period. Not even "antlerless." Limited cow/doe, bull/buck licenses would be available by lottery. Neither did I make these arguments in jest, having "wasted" my own precious hunting tags every so often on infant cervids to indicate that I mean what I preach.
The fact is that calves and fawns suffer a high mortality on the way to growing into competent adults. Generally, only a small fraction will succeed. That fraction, on average, is two out of 10 calves or fawns born to a female cervid across her reproductive life. In cause-and-effect terms, the high birth rate is both the consequence and ultimate cause of the high mortality.
That is, over hundreds of thousands of years, females that produced one calf or two fawns per year were able to maintain their genes in the population. Those that put out fewer young did not.
You need not invoke some cosmic principle that cervids are born to feed myriads of predators-although, factually, that's perfectly correct. Cervid flesh makes predators. Deer, which tend to twin, have suffered, on average, higher predation historically than have elk and other species that bear only one young.
However, if you weigh mother and young at birth, you may discover that both the mothers of twins (deer, moose) and singles (elk, bison) in terms of foetal weight relative to the mother's body mass, produce exactly the same birth mass! For an instance, moose and bison cows weigh virtually the same. Bison normally produce one 35-pound calf, while moose generally make two 17-pound twins. While elk do it in one package (single calf), mule deer prefer two (twin fawns).
One can play with this phenomenon, as I have done, to show that foetal mass at birth reflects predation pressure and adaptation to that pressure. What is crucial is that most calves/fawns will soon die. Only the luckiest and best (fittest) will survive. Therefore, either hunters or Mother Nature can take them. By contrast, healthy adult cervids have low mortality rates from predation and winter.
Thus, the logical harvesting strategy is to take calves or fawns during the fall hunting seasons, before winter can waste them, compensating with a lowering of the adult kill quota.
Such a scheme generates, on average, an older population of females who, because of their age and acquired experience, make much better mothers, producing larger, healthier and more young, while better protecting them against predation. Additionally, being better acquainted with where to feed, older moms produce richer milk in greater quantities, leading to superior body growth and survival of their offspring.
This higher-young, lower-adult harvest is the cervid management strategy I favor. It's also the strategy used to manage moose in Sweden, with wonderful results.
In short, a population of cervids in which females live well into maturity-say, eight to 12 years-will produce far more calves or fawns, so that either more hunters can participate or more calf/fawn permits can be given out per hunter. And wild predators win as well. Moreover, on average, hunters who take infants rather than adults are harvesting much better quality table meat, leading to a heightened enthusiasm among their spouses for the hunt!
At the same time, by "keeping our fingers off" bulls and bucks, we get an adult population with a high male/female ratio-a natural sex ratio. Now miracles begin to happen: The rut is advanced and shortened. Young are born earlier in the spring and across a shorter time. Ergo: a shorter "spread" of vulnerability to predation and more time to grow large before winter, resulting in fewer young lost to carnivores and winterkill.
Another benefit of a high mature-male ratio is that with more big boys about, more "young bucks" drop out of the breeding. These youngsters then can save their precious fat stores for winter. Consequently: better male survival. Additionally, these unhappily celibate young males will have fewer, if any, rutting-battle wounds to heal. They can, therefore, stick their caloric reserves into improved body and antler growth the following spring. In this way, when not heavily harvested, bulls and bucks, relative to females, not only become more numerous but larger in body and antler mass as well.
In this scenario-more hunting of calves and fawns, less hunting of mature bulls and bucks-hunters soon will start seeing lots of big males. If they wait their turn and are drawn by lottery, they will be able to go out and likely get a very nice trophy. Meanwhile, they are hunting calves and fawns and bringing home the finest meat.
Additionally, if this management scheme is used for mule deer, invading whitetails have little chance of breeding with estrus mule deer does, as those does will virtually always be defended by a big buck, and white-tailed bucks avoid large muley bucks. Thus, management in favor of producing mature bucks reduces the chances of white-tailed deer gradually "taking over" mule deer populations through hybridization, as they currently are doing in parts of the Canadian and American West.
Focusing the annual cervid kill on fawns and calves is a winner in every respect!
Sincerely,
Val Geist
A curious concept, at first blush. But in fact, it's a logical restatement of the old axiom of "quality over quantity." We can have better trophy hunting via less trophy hunting.
After having my musings bolstered by Dr. Geist, I ran them past the critical ears of Colorado bowhunter, wildlife biologist and hunting ethicist Tom Beck. Here is Beck's response, all the more impressive in that it was offered without foreknowledge of what Geist had to say:
Well Dave, it's as simple as this: Most of each year's crop of calves and fawns will die before they see a second spring, and the primary killer is winter. Therefore, if you hunt them in the fall, you're hardly affecting the infant-death dynamics at all. What we're talking about here is compensatory mortality-the fact that most cervid young are going to die within a few months anyhow, making them biological supernumeraries-so we might as well hunt them, then compensate by curtailing the harvest of genetically essential adult males. In this way, without reducing herd numbers, we can improve both age and gender ratios, more closely imitating the conditions of natural selection.
And in all age categories, with both deer and elk, we need to be killing more females and fewer males.
Dale McCullough, who's done extensive herd-density research with mule and black-tailed deer, presents a clear and convincing argument that we don't want the maximum number of cervids on a given range, as we often get with current management paradigms favoring male-only hunting. Say you have a range that can "support" a thousand cervids. With male-only hunting, you'll eventually wind up with a radically skewed sex ratio. What's more, with the range being cropped at maximum carrying capacity, both flora and fauna are severely stressed.
To escape this trap, you have to reduce the number of females, so that the survivors will have better nutrition, leading to more and bigger young, along with a higher percentage of male births. Although we don't understand the precise dynamics of it, well-nourished cervids tend to produce more male young than female.
Additionally, with a healthier range operating at less than full carrying capacity, you get a higher first-winter survival rate for infants. This is a very compelling argument for hunting females and young instead of mature males, and why I almost never kill a bull or buck.
Even should we stop all hunting, as the animal rights folks would like, the ratio of male to female cervids will never return to normal and healthy unless a lot of females are somehow removed from the population. A primary reason for this is that every time you get a hard winter, the males-being nutritionally stressed and maybe wounded from the fall rut-are the first to die.
Therefore, the very concept of "carrying capacity," as interpreted by livestock ranchers and most wildlife managers, is misleading and harmful, in that you obtain optimum herd balance and health when a range is utilized at below its ecological carrying capacity. Rather than maximum carrying capacity, we should be managing for optimal carrying capacity. And the only way we can achieve that is to emphasize the hunting of females and young.
The genetic imperative for all life is to reproduce itself. Under relentless predatory pressure, evolution naturally favors the gene strains of those individuals who produce larger numbers of young. Were it not for countless millennia spent living under heavy infant-predation pressure, deer might never have evolved to the present norm of having twins, or elk to one calf almost every year. But because, genetically, they "know" they'll be losing most of their young, cervids have "learned" to produce more-an excess large enough to compensate for predation, winterkill and other "baby" killers.
For all these reasons and more, in most situations, were it possible to make the distinction, the primary hunter's target-from biological, ecological and evolutionary points of view; and thus from an ethical perspective as well-should be female calves and fawns.
Indeed. All points considered, it's not only Bambi who must die for the good of his kind, but his doe-eyed girlfriend Faline as well-even especially.
In a memorable essay titled "In the Snow Queen's Palace," Mary Zeiss Stange recalled a meat hunt she and her husband, both then in grad school and poor, shared the day before Thanksgiving out on the frozen, wind-scoured plains of eastern Montana in the record-breaking cold winter of 1985.
Early in their hunt, she writes:
. . . after several hundred yards of crunching through ice-encrusted grass, we sprinted along a fenceline toward the creek bed. Skidding down an embankment . . . we were suddenly brought up short by what lay ahead: a little fawn, curled as if asleep, snugly nestled in the snow drifted against a fencepost. The tiny deer was frozen solid . . . Doug knelt and stroked the fawn affectionately, as one might a cat or dog found napping by the woodstove . . . A little death like this could not go unmarked, unmourned.
Farther along, the couple encounters a group of deer clustered in a patch of woods, too cold and winter-weak even to run away as the hunters approach. These pitiful creatures were "trapped by their instinct to survive." Stange says, "In such a situation, shooting was impossible."
Exchanging "a quick glance and a wordless nod," she and her husband turned and walked away. Finally, as their hunt was about to end, Mary and Doug spotted some deer at the far end of the field:
No more than indistinct shapes, they appeared and disappeared, phantoms in the now thinly falling snow. With the wind in our favor, and the snow as much camouflage for us as for them, we proceeded along the fence until we were perhaps two hundred yards away. Steadying my .30-06 on a fencepost, I focused the scope on a doe, another doe, a fawn, another fawn. Teeth chattering and my right hand burning with cold . . . I thought quickly about the fawn we had seen curled peacefully in the snow, about those deer paralyzed for sheer survival in the trees. "I'm taking the one farthest to the left," I whispered to Doug, who was also aiming his rifle. I placed the crosshairs for a heart shot, and fired. His shot came an instant later. We had killed the two fawns.
Soon after Stange's essay appeared in Sports Afield, the magazine's letters column bristled with outrage, accusing Stange of being a heartless baby-killer and glorifying her blood-lust in print. But as director of women's studies at Skidmore College and author of Woman the Hunter, Stange is hardly your run-of-the-mill sexist pig or redneck hunter. What her critics missed is that had she and her husband killed the two does, both fawns would certainly have died as well, due to their inexperience in finding food and shelter and the severity of the winter. Even had the hunters killed nothing, statistical probability predicts that both youngsters would have succumbed to winterkill.
Of course, the Stanges could have killed one doe/fawn pair, thus preserving the other "family unit." But then, the one spared fawn would likely soon have died, leaving only one doe to reproduce herself come spring. By killing both of the fawns and sparing both of the does, they had gotten some excellent meat without harming either the post-winter population or the reproductive potential of the local herd.
There can be little doubt that human predators have been killing Bambis from the beginning. This was brought home to me this past late May, while enjoying an evening walk with my good dog Otis. As we slipped
quietly along a game trail through a green tunnel of aspens, an elk cow rose suddenly and silently just 20 yards ahead. We stopped short (from long practice in the presence of large wildlife, Otis knows the drill), and the cow just stared.
Figuring the cow had a calf stashed nearby, and not wishing to disturb them further, we did an about-face to backtrack out of there. Within a few steps, Otis detected what we'd both missed on the way in: a tiny spotted elk calf curled beside a mossy log just a few feet off the trail.
Too young to run away and instinctively paralyzed by what biologists call the "hider strategy," the calf just lay there, moving only its big brown eyes. I quietly called Otis back-he only wanted to sniff the furry little bundle, but even that was too much-and we made ourselves scarce. But had I wanted the calf that Otis and I had stumbled upon, it would have been as simple as stepping up and whacking it on the head with a club or rock, no more difficult than clouting a fool hen.
Long before ancestral humans developed the tools and skills of true hunters, they doubtless included the capture of infant animals in their foraging strategies. Just as all four-legged predators do yet today. Of course, no "sporting" hunter would consider "murdering" a "helpless" 40-pound spotted calf. But by fall and hunting season, that same calf will weigh some 200 pounds-as big as a big deer-and be anything but helpless.
In a report titled "Results of Special Calf-Only Hunting Seasons in the East Kootenay Region of British Columbia," researchers Raymond A. Demarchi and Anna J. Wolterson observe that:
The strategy of maximizing calf harvest may be difficult for some hunters to accept. However, it is our experience that if explained that calf harvests form the basis of both the cattle ranching industry and natural [wild] ungulate population regulation, most hunters will agree with the concept. Hunters in the East Kootenay have demonstrated a willingness to harvest calves when directed. [More than] nine years of experience . . . have proven that calf elk hunting is an effective management regime in regulating elk population structure and numbers while increasing recreational hunting opportunities.
Of course, it's one thing to intellectualize about the biological wisdom of killing "supernumerary" young and females while allowing more mature males to live and reproduce, and quite another to bring that wisdom to the field. Like so many others, I may never completely rid myself of big-antler compulsion, especially regarding elk. Once you're out there-the bugling, the rut-stench, those antlers-everything changes. To most of us, elk hunting means bull hunting.
It's in the blood, we could say, and one hell of an urge to try and overcome. But someday, it may just have to be, if not by free choice, then by regulation. For now, if for no better reason than an experiment in personal will and self-control, I have reason to try. This next elk season, my trophy of choice will be Bambi.
David Petersen hunts, guides and writes from his home in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. His most recent book is Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World (Johnson Books, 1998).
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Bob Raup
Webmaster
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
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