The trouble with the antis is that "They cannot see the wood for the trees"

This particular cliché might have been invented for the anti-hunt lobby, so perfectly does it describe their attitude towards the countryside.

Let me explain :

Imagine, if you would, an area of land containing 1,000 trees.

The "Tree Rights" Campaigners would come to this area and say :

Look at all these marvellous trees. These trees are beautiful. Every single one of these Trees has the right to life. No one shall harm a single one of these Trees. We shall protect them.

And so they do. They make sure that no one harms any of the trees, and that all of them have an equal chance of life.

And the trees grow up to be tall. Very tall, in fact, because they do not have the space to grow outward. As their canopies expand, they gradually block out the light from the ground beneath them, so that no shrubs or herbs or young trees can get adequate light to grow there. Without this growth, the understory ( = floor level) is cold and dark with little in the way of wildlife.

And in years to come, when the trees have grown to maturity, they will have :

A stand of 1,000 fully-grown trees of identical age.

There would be no wildlife, no understory, no oncoming generations of trees and no future.

The "rights" of every tree may have been preserved, but as an ecosystem it would be a vacuum.

 

Alternatively :

We would come to the area and say :

Hmm, this wood has a certain amount of potential, but I think it needs thinning out first.

And we would go into the wood and cut down, we would immediately kill, 15% of the trees, and we would burn the wood, and we would enjoy sitting in front of the fire.

And the holes in the canopy created by the thinning would allow pools of light through to the woodland floor and herbs and shrubs would flourish, attracting insects and small birds and mammals, and a new generation of young trees would begin to come on.

Unfortunately, after a while, these small mammals are so much at home in our wood in such numbers that they are starting to take a real toll of the young trees. So we build an artificial fox earth to encourage the foxes to come in and keep down the numbers of (to kill) the small mammals.

Encouraged by the attractive combinations of dark and shade, thicket and glade, Deer might start to come into the wood, and we would enjoy seeing them as we work in the wood.

But later, like the voles, the deer, too, become so numerous that we have to ask the local game-dealer to come into the wood to go stalking and shoot (kill) some of the deer to control the numbers. Later, we would enjoy eating the venison that he gives us.

As the years go by, and the young trees grow, it is time to thin the wood again (killing more trees) to allow them space to develop, and we sell the thinnings to help pay for the work.

As we grow more and more fond of the wood we decide that we want to increase the wildlife holding capacity of the wood by making more glades and planting more shrubs and fruiting trees. But this work all costs money.

So, in order to help finance the ongoing management of the wood, we introduce start a shoot. The work necessary to make the wood a good home for pheasants is the same as needed to be done for other wildlife, but by involving the shoot (and killing the pheasants) we can make it self financing. The "guns" will enjoy the shoot, and pay for the privilege, and we will enjoy eating the pheasants.

By this time, the rich pickings in the wood have encouraged the foxes to increase in numbers. Whilst we still want foxes in the wood to keep down the number of small mammals that might damage our trees, we don't want too many, because they will eat too many of our pheasants. So we invite the local hunt to come and control the foxes.

We don't want to kill them all, because they still fulfil a useful role in our ecosystem, but we need to kill some, because if they eat too many pheasants we will not be able to earn the money we need to do the work in the wood. So the hunt will come and hunt the foxes, and we will enjoy following the hunt.

And, in years to come, when the survivors of the original trees gave grown to maturity, we will have :

A healthy, vibrant woodland ecosystem.

It will have generations of young trees growing on, with a flourishing and varied understory supporting a diverse wildlife population, and the entire system will be self-sustaining for the future.

And we will have achieved this by an on-going process of killing, and we will have funded this by exploiting people’s enjoyment of the firewood, the meat and the field sports that are the results of that killing.

 

 

The "Tree Rights" Campaigners could have made their thousand trees into a woodland ecosystem too, but they couldn’t see the wood for the trees.