Piece & Dove

Something else bubbling around my brain ... On a general tack of emotional responses disconnecting with present understanding of an ecosystem in public debate about wildlife management policy.

I'm recalling how a number of years ago there was a big fuss going around as to whether or not to allow a dove hunting season in Ohio. I was young and still in process of discovering that many of my professed views might actually have more to do with exchanging cues of group 'tribe' coherence than anything I'd really thought out independently. My peer group mostly centered around a large university district and it's satellite neighborhoods and a litany of artsy-fartsy and academic urban intellectual 'progressive' boilerplated ideas/ideals. Anyway, it was an article which broke things down citing figures from the DNR and graduate studies that really ended up making a big impression.

I'm gonna' make up arbitrary numbers for convenience, but the relevant pattern should still hold true.

Let's say there are 100,000 doves in a given region in the fall after the breeding and raising seasons. However, records show that the region only ever supports 30,000 – 50,000 over the winter. In other words, a max of only about 40,000 ever make it to the next spring, regardless of the size of the population in the fall. If the fall population is regularly say 90,000 – 110,000 doves then 30,000+ of them could be harvested annually by human hunters without any noticeable impact on the year to year dove population. As long as thought/study was given to understanding what percentage of doves that were getting 'naturally culled' were dying of starvation and disease vs. predation. If predators were relying on a significant portion the numbers could be adjusted to reflect such. The point being that what was being demonstrated by boots on the ground research was that some folks going out with shotguns every fall and harvesting doves was unlikely to affect the doves collectively as a species much if at all. Other than sparing some of them a slow demise to hunger and cold.

Folks opposed to having dove hunting generally not only did not refute the figures but actually refused to address these figures at all. Generally making unsubstantiated (well, scientifically unsubstantiated) pleas to emotion. The vast majority of these folks had no qualms about eating commercially farmed chicken and turkey products (i.e. birds someone else killed for them). So what was the big deal with doves? They weren't up-in-arms about pheasants, wild turkeys, or water fowl? Or crows for that matter. Why doves?

What seemed likely to me was a theory put forth that doves had iconic associations in people's minds with peace, love, and bibles and that it was bleed over from their use as symbols which was interfering with some folks accepting their use as food.