ANIMAL PLANET

PREDATORS

People forget that the animals were here first. This is their planet too and we have to share it with them. When man starts interfering with the food chain, things get crazy. Here in Alabama is a great example. Alabama at one time had cougars and wolves to keep the deer population in control. I KNOW, all of those who say, "Don't kill Bambi", well I hate to break it to you, but Bambi was a cartoon.

Right now Alabama has a deer population of over a million and we are constantly cutting down forest and building houses. That causes a shrinkage of a food supply for the deer. So, poor Bambi, instead of a quick death by a hunter, ends up dying a slow death of starvation.

Yellow Stone National Park found that out when their elk population was shown to be malnourished. There were more elk than the park could support. And since people were against having wholesale hunting in the park, they did what nature had done long before man came along, they re-introduced the grey wolf to the area. The wolf had been killed out of the park for fear that they would attack visitors.

Now the ranchers near by weren't happy because they claimed that the wolves were killing their cattle, or sheep. So, the government set up a program where if a rancher could "prove" his livestock were being killed by a wolf, he would be given a permit to kill it. It has had some limited success, but its also shown that ranchers will fake a "kill" just so they can shoot a wolf.

Look at it another way, if we didn't' have snakes around, the world would be overrun by mice and rats, since they breed every 6 weeks. A prime example happened in Australia a few years back when a huge part of the country was overrun by mice and rats. People had been killing the snakes that lived in the area for fear of being killed by them, but then that left no predator for the mice and rats.

Nature has its own way of population control if man will just leave it alone.