Culling the Herd

This article http://www.startribune.com/531/story/1014602.html touches on many of the themes we've discussed in class. Basically, the DNR is hiring sharpshooters to thin deer in an area where there's been an outbreak of bovine TB. This is being done to prevent the spread of the disease to both deer and cattle. Some interesting implications. The idea of decreasing a population to ameliorate an adverse enviromental condition is just what we were discussing in class, regarding human population and famine. It mentions in the article how unnatural deer feeding has led to inflated deer numbers, which only exacerbates disease transmission (and other) problems for deer, exactly as our telepathic gorilla friend warned with food production and human population. There are some interesting food implications, as well. The venison will be be vended and donated, and the culling will (hopefully) be a plus for cattle herds and for the state deer herd long term, as well. Although any time where we step in to play at environmental power concerns me somewhat, this may be a time when we can use our ability to destroy to good advantage, to bring deer populations down to carrying capacity and to go from a slow, wasting, chronic disease to more effective limiting factor.

Also, my browser (Safari) doesn't support blogger's nifty text formatting buttons, so I am unable to make the above link into, well, an actual link. If someone with editorial powers could do that, it'd rock.