h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If not how did it end up there?

If you have either answer it would help with a post Iam preparing.

one love

The fox was introduced to Australia by some 19th century English idiot and environmental vandal who thought it would be nice to have something to hunt.

We also got lumbered with rabbits, carp and various other pests that are now destroying the environment.

On the bright side, a proposal to introduce monkeys 'so that travellers wil be amused by their antics' never got off the ground.

Ivan.

*wishes there were monkeys to entertain her during her lunch break*

.. and Fox Hunters in England try to comvince us that Fox Hunting is some kind of pest control.

It would be nice if they could pick one reason and stick to it

What? Since when were people only allowed one reason for doing something?

'Oh, no, sorry mate, you can't play football because you enjoy it, you've already given your reason as being because it keeps you fit' .

When you pick two reasons that are mutally exclusive in order to justify something aborrant to most people, then it gets silly.

Keeping fit and enyoying it are mutally inclusive.

Pest control and conservation is not. Two reasons that have been used to justify fox hunting.

Donald

Pest control and conservation are related. Keeping fox numbers at appropriate levels benefits the environment.

Why would any one want to conserve a pest? If its a pest, you eliminate it. Conservation seeks to preserve something that is in danger of being eliminated.

Either the fox is something worthy of conservation or it is a pest to be eliminated - it can't be both.

If foxes really where the pests that they are claimed to be, they would have gone the way of the wolf hundreds of years ago.

Donald

The fact remains, the appropriate level for the fox population in Australia is 0. How kind of the British - not only did they dump their unwanted people here, they sent their vermin too.

'Why would any one want to conserve a pest? If its a pest, you eliminate it. Conservation seeks to preserve something that is in danger of being eliminated.'

That's a rather old-fashioned and simplistic view of conservation.
Surely conservation seeks to manage an environment to maintain its balance. Hunting is part of the environment and habitat that is rural Britain. Remove it, and you create an imbalance.

'Either the fox is something worthy of conservation or it is a pest to be eliminated'

Good God man, hunters they call savage. So now we seek to rearrange environments to our own liking do we? Funny, that sounds to me like the sort of action Ivan decried as 'Environmental vandalism'

Stop whining man, without us you'd still be stuck over here enjoying a British September.

KA - was that last piece of venom directed at me?

I'm delighted to say that I have no British ancestry whatsoever.

It wasn't a piece of venom I can assure you, it was a joke. I don't do venom, brings me out in a rash.

I wasn't sure if you had or not, so I thought I'd potentially sacrifice accuracy for the sake of humour.

Yes, well, you hit a nerve.

My father's family has lived here for 170 years, yet at school the English brats who were just off the boat used to hurl abuse at me, the 'foreigner', and tell me to go back where I came from. The arrogance of the British isn't something I've ever been able to come to grips with.

I appreciate that this was not your intent.

>> So now we seek to rearrange environments to our own liking do we? <<

That is just what the fox hunters are doing.

Any animal that had been hunted as long and as consistently has the fox had would have been hunted to extinction by now as the wolf was. But thats not the hunters objective, otherwise they would have nothing left to exercise their blood lust on. Conservation is about encouraging and promoting natural processes. There's nothing natural about one canine hunting another.

>> Surely conservation seeks to manage an environment to maintain its balance. <<

Sure but as stated above, setting one canine against another is not maintaining any kind of natural balance.

>> Hunting is part of the environment and habitat that is rural Britain. Remove it, and you create an imbalance. <<

Fox hunting is no more part of the natural habitat than wind farms are, it is an invention of man, not nature. The hunters have themselves created an imbalance. Left to its own devices the fox would find its own level, hunting its natural prey of small mammals like rabbits. There is now an abundance of rabbits in the countryside because there are no foxes to control them - they are all to busy going after easier prey like chickens and sheep and raiding urban dustbins because they have been terrorised from their natural environment by the hunters.

Ask a Scottish farmer how this so called "imbalance" has affected them since fox hunting was banned in Scotland.

Donald

The probelm is that the original natural balance doesn't exist in that many places in countries like the UK. The fact that wolves (who would have been a predator of foxes, yeah?) don't exist is significant. What is keeping the fox population contained (apart from humans)?

Also, huge amounts of the fox's natural habitat was been destroyed, so it will be adapting both to the changed rural ecology, and to the relatively new urban one. Given that the food chain etc has been so disrupted, I think we need to pay far more attention to observing how those adaptations are occurring.

>>Conservation is about encouraging and promoting natural processes<<

I absolutely agree. I see humans as having a role in this, although I think that we are far from acting intelligently in this area.

I'm not sure what the solution is (and bearing in mind that I'm speaking from a completely different ecosystem in NZ). I'm not at all comfortable with fox hunting for sport. But I do have a respect for rural traditions (although the hunting one seems to have gone far beyond necessity).

In NZ we hear a similar conservation/hunting argument around feral deer - the Dept of Conservation wants them to be eradicated (as much as possible). The hunting community wants the levels kept high enough to ensure continued hunting. Meanwhile the deer are chomping their way through the bush, and we are still losing native species partly as a result.


>>Ask a Scottish farmer how this so called "imbalance" has affected them since fox hunting was banned in Scotland.<<

I don't know any Scottish farmers. Care to elaborate?

who would have been a predator of foxes, yeah?

No. Wolves are pack animals, unlike foxes who are solitary hunters. Hunting as a pack, wolves would have gone for larger prey like deer and cattle. A practise that brought them into conflict with humans so they had to be eradicated.

What is keeping the fox population contained (apart from humans)?

Natural process like the supply of food which ultimately controls the population of all species. Hunting preempts that process leading to a surfeit of rabbits as mentioned above. So if hunting were to cease, the would be an increase in the fox population do to the abundance of rabbits. Eventually a sustainable level would be reached.

I don't know any Scottish farmers. Care to elaborate?

Fox hunting was banned in Scotland by the Scottish Parliament in 2002. It hasn't resulted in a plague of foxes as predicted by the hunters.

Some time ago, a Scottish landowner who name escapes me, banned fox hunting on his own land long before any legal ban came into effect. After the this self imposed ban attacks on his sheep ceased, attacks that were a regular occurrence during the hunting season.

Donald

Thanks Donald. That is interesting about the Scottish experience.

Are you saying that foxes have no natural predators? I would have thought that wolves would have eaten foxes and other small mammals, although perhaps not as their primary food source. Also I'm not so sure about cattle - they are an introduced species surely?


>>Natural process like the supply of food which ultimately controls the population of all species. Hunting preempts that process leading to a surfeit of rabbits as mentioned above. So if hunting were to cease, the would be an increase in the fox population do to the abundance of rabbits. Eventually a sustainable level would be reached.<<

Yes, up to a point. However as I said the English countryside is significantly altered from that in which foxes evolved. And there are new issues to do with urban food sources. While I do believe that nature is incredibly competent at adjusting, I also think that big changes in ecosystems leads to big changes in animal population behaviours (including breeding, sourcing food etc).

I am curious - are you opposed to killing wildlife on principle, or can you see situations where it is justified?

Yes, Kea, cattle are an introduced species. They were brought across from the European mainland by the Angles and the Saxons at a time when there were still wolves in the British Isles. The last wolf was killed in Scotland in 1745, shortly before sheep were introduced to the Highlands during the Clearances.

There is a move to re-introduce the wolf back to Britain. You may find the following article interesting:

http://www.wolftrust.org.uk/whyreintroduce.html

I agree, nature is incredibly competent at re-adjusting. Fox hunting has been going on for about 350 years and has to some extent preempted that natural process. Once it is removed the natural process will take over. No one can be sure just how that will pan out, but at least it should be given a chance.

I'm not against killing wildlife in principle, there may well be situations where it is justified but sport isn't one of them.

Donald