I have gotten into huge arguments with Bambi lovers. They'll say stuff like "Well, the deer were here first." Indeed they were, and so were the cougars and wolves. Man has all but eliminated the wolf from the lower 48 except a few places like Michigan's UP.
The deer out there eating your rosebush may look cuter than hell, but do you really want to sacrifice your life for it? I don't know of any Bambi-lover who has sold their home and moved back to Europe or something because "the deer were here first."
We are destroying habitat left and right in the West with our ranchette style subdivisions and the growing populations of Denver, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque. We need to accept the fact that Bambi is going to be a casualty of this or else become a casualty of Bambi.
Again, it all really goes back to the cattlemen's groups. They want to get rid of the predators because a predator will take down the occasional sheep or calf. They don't stop to think how many deer and rabbits the predators take down, as well. Every deer that a courgar eats leaves that much more forage for the rancher's herds. But ranchers want to eliminate all predators, completely. Unfortunately, the number of deer culled by the hunting crowd just isn't enough in the collision between the urban and the wild in today's West.
We've wandered around in this thread, but I think Fallen Fairy will also get a good idea of some of the issues that are important out here in the western states if she is still reading all this.
