• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    18 days ago

    Killing off predators has a cascading effect that comes back to bite you in the ass. They killed off all the natural predators of deer in Indiana and now, not only are there deer everywhere (people in Bloomington have to fence in their gardens because of an urban deer problem), if enough of them aren’t culled by hunters every year, they eat up all the food and not only do a bunch of deer starve to death, but so do all the other animals that they share that food with.

    But talk about re-introducing wolves and bears and cougars to Indiana and people think they’ll be murdered in their beds… as if there are constant maulings in the parts of the U.S. with those animals. You’re more likely to be killed by a deer running in front of your car in Bloomington in the middle of the day. Which sure as hell almost happened to me once.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      18 days ago

      TL;DW it’s similar to what I was saying above- the deer in Yellowstone were eating all the grass because there were no wolves. They reintroduced the wolves and the deer started avoiding areas where the wolves were most likely to catch them. Much like the negative cascading effect I was talking about in Indiana, this had a positive cascading effect which greatly increased the biodiversity of the entire region and even had effect on rivers due to less soil erosion.