16 ms·
Elites tried to monopolize hunting
- jakear 4y agoThey succeeded in Europe, no? Any public land hunters over there?
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- baud147258 4y agoon 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
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI 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.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- sbaiddn 4y ago
- barry-cotter 4y ago
- knaekhoved 4y ago
- _notreallyme_ 4y agoI 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...
- iLoveOncall 4y agoWell yes my point was there would just be a lot less if it was only for the elite.
- HarryHirsch 4y agoYou 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.
- collegeburner 4y agoyeah facts and this is to say nothing of how overpopulation has spread chronic wasting disease (nasty ass prion) around a lot. and if you think deer are bad try feral hogs... nasty, can kill you, aggressive, tear up anything and everything.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoMost hunters aren't feeding animals.
- topspin 4y agoHmm. 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.
- metadat 4y agoParent may be thinking of: French hunters react angrily to drinking ban plan to reduce accidental deaths https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33100432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33100432 (21 days ago; 14 points, 8 comments)
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- CSSer 4y agoThis 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.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoWhy are French hunters so incompetent compared to other countries? Different attitudes towards intoxication?
- laurencerowe 4y agoFrance 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. https://accident.laws.com/hunting-accidents https://accident.laws.com/hunting-accidents > 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. https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/How-often-do-hunting-accidents-happen-in-France https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/How-ofte... 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
- collegeburner 4y agoi mean that by itself is not conclusive. in Texas it's almost all private hunting land but it's plenty egalitarian.
- MandieD 4y agoIt’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.
- paganel 4y ago> Any public land hunters over there? France is an infamous example. 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.
- weberer 4y agoIn Finland you can hunt wherever you want, even on someone else's property. It's called "everyman's rights".
- hirundo 4y ago
- EdwardDiego 4y agoNZ 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.
- sidewndr46 4y agoHow does one go about privatizing a river? Does NZ not have laws around access to navigable waterways?
- aliqot 4y agoinstall a large weir and call it a trout preservation area.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EdwardDiego 4y agoWell, 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hamilton_(engineer)#Jet_boats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hamilton_(engineer)#Jet_b... [1]: https://www.herengaanuku.govt.nz/knowledge/rivers-lakes-and-coast/access-along-rivers-lakes-and-the-coast/explaining-the-queens-chain-myth/ https://www.herengaanuku.govt.nz/knowledge/rivers-lakes-and-...
- captainoats 4y agoAlways 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.
- bitwize 4y agoSome things should be priced out of everybody getting to have one. Like cars.
- chayesfss 4y agoaccording 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
- MikeTheGreat 4y ago> 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 :) )
- topspin 4y ago> 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.
- xyzzyz 4y agoThis 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.
- LeftHandPath 4y agoSmall 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 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").
- chayesfss 4y agoluckily 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?
- club_tropical 4y agoAnd 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.
- vintermann 4y agoI 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.
- HyperSane 4y agoSame way modern elites monopolize stock dividends.