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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (151753)	11/16/2004 2:06:54 PM
From: Fangorn	Respond to of 281500

neolib, Keep your kids and pets inside, cougars will take anything and deer are a lot harder to catch than toddlers or overweight poodles. And of course the farmer is no happier losing his livestock to predators than he is losing corn to the deer. Your solution is no solution however. And it is still a fact where the cougar is recovering that the deer population is controlled by the available food, not predators. Cougars will improve the health of a deer herd but in the long term will not reduce the size of the herd which will return to just above the carrying level of the terrain after adjusting to the increased predation. Short term a drop in deer numbers, long term a rebound to the limit imposed by food supply. Without the "great white hunter" (bigotry alert) deer populations experience huge population swings, mild winters let large numbers survive and reproduce setting the stage for mass starvation when normal winter returns, harsh winters often severly reduce deer populations but they rebound within a couple years to the carrying capacity of the land. Cougars and wolves live on the edges of the herd and sledom take any but the sick, injured and old, most of which would soon die anyway. Coyotes have a larger impact on deer populations than cougars or wolves as they target new born fauns and are very effective at it, but even they have much less impact on deer populations than food supply.