TheOverAnalyzed

James McWilliams, writing for Pacific Standard:

For all the rhetoric that hunters spew about maintaining environmental balance, it has been the primal desire to shoot wild animals that has motivated their behavior [emphasis added]. It’s worth recalling that the invasive hog problem hunters earnestly promised to solve was partially created by the hunters in the first place.

Hog populations have skyrocketed in the last few decades in large part because feral hogs have been trapped and moved to enclosed hunting preserves. This is done so weekend warriors can pay big bucks to play Davy Crockett. But the pigs aren’t thrilled with the arrangement. Capable of squeezing under fences with the agility of field mice, they routinely escape the game park, disappear into the surroundings, and dance their dance. This is most likely why New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have feral hogs.

Bottom line: Hunting hogs increases the hog population.

Every once in a while something amazing will pop up in my feed, show up in RSS, or get auto-added to my Instapaper queue thanks to IFTTT. And every once in a while, that thing sums up an issue better than I ever could have on my own.

This is one of those reads.

In just the past two years,^[1] tremendous strides have been taken in regards to the welfare of animals and the environment. Horse slaughter has been kept at bay (more or less), veganism/vegetarianism are on the rise, and recent political events suggests that the average member of our society thinks we could be doing things differently.

Good news.