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What is culling?

The term culling is generally used when referring to the mass slaughter of a particular species of animal. Most often the target of a "cull" is an invasive species, or a species deemed to be a "pest" whether that be to other animals or to humans.
Since I'm from Australia I'm going to focus on that for now, its a complex issue and I wont pretend to know much about culling programs in other countries or the difficulties faced with overpopulation.

Culling programs in Australia are most often directed at species such as (but not limited to) wild pigs, wild goats, wild horses, feral cats, rabbits, deer and kangaroos. Wait, Kangaroos? yes. Our national emblem, the animal we chose to represent our country internationally is not only hunted and eaten (which I have no problem with) but they are slaughtered en mass because we deem them to be "pests" and "overpopulated" errrr, ok?

Given humans are the most overpopulated species on earth I find the sentiment of overpopulation as reasoning a bit rich. When I say culling, I don't mean a few thousand. I mean millions.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australia-kangaroos-culling-killing-murder-deaths-a-year-a7583186.html

The above article outlined the plan to cull over a million kangaroos in 2017 as well as noting that over 1.5 million were culled during 2015. These are the tagged animals only. The ones we consider "legally" killed. That number doesn't include the thousands killed/shot illegally, that get caught in fences or hit by cars. In fact insurance company AAMI alone took over 20,000 claims due to accidents with kangaroos in 2015. Given the number of collisions that wouldn't be reported and the number of different insurance companies there is, 20,000 is a very small drop in the pond.

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(oh look, how charming. what a way to treat the animals we chose to represent us)

Now before I go on I want to point out, I have no issue with hunting so long as you do it responsibly and for a reason. I mean you aim to kill the animal with as little pain as possible and you plan on using that animal. There is no reason to just kill it for fun and leave it. I have had 4 joeys come through my rescue in the last week who's mothers had been shot. The mother was shot and the babies just left there with their mothers corpse, it was going to be 2 dead roos for no reason. Even the hunter that brought the baby to me said it was a pretty low act by whoever did it.

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Does culling actually work?

When it comes to culling advocates like to point out things like * X number of feral cats were killed which means x number of native animals weren't killed by the cats* unfortunately this is a fallacy. A group of researchers from Tasmania decided to see how effective their trapping and killing was on the feral cat population. After selecting 4 large portions of forest 2 of the sections were trapped and hunted over the course of a year. For the first while it seemed to be effective with the number of cats being caught in traps dropping rapidly. However when the area was monitored and cameras installed researchers noted that as resident cats were taken out even more new cats appeared. These newcomers did not enter traps. As a result the abundance of cats actually went up in areas being trapped, both to higher than pre-trapping and the other 2 areas of forest that were left alone.

Is this isolated though? no, this has been recreated multiple times including with ferrets on a British island where their population doubled to pre-cull levels.

Now In saying this there are success stories when it comes to culling. Just last month I worked on Churchill island in Victoria which had eradicated both feral cats and foxes from the island entirely. Other success's include the vast reduction in camel numbers in central Australia. An invasive species that was brought here and thrived in our harsh conditions. The most recent estimate I can find states there are 1.2 million wild camels and who's numbers are thought to double every 8-9 years.

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So whats the answer?

Simple, spaying and neutering. We go through the work of trapping these animals, whether its feral cats or pigs and then kill them, allowing another to take its place. If you were to catch and then spay the animal could go back and defend its territory, preventing other competitors from coming in and breeding. Killing them, for the most part, just gives the illusion we are solving the problem. People are out culling rabbits all day, I met a man who told me he shot 140 rabbits in one day a few weeks ago, like I should be impressed. I said "sweet, theres 200 million wild rabbits in Australia. A rabbit gestates for only 30 days and can have a litter of 12 babies. That means a single individual female can produce 140 rabbits in a year. Do you really think you made a difference?" Of course not, but some people feel the need to try and justify that they enjoy killing shit.

I don't think spaying/neutering would work for rabbits either, just as a side note, but culling them isn't.
We've been culling certain species for years only for their numbers to continue to explode.
It's time to start looking for a better solution. Something more effective.
For both the sake of the animals we're culling and the animals we pretend we're helping, cos we really aren't doing anything for them.

Steem on Steemians

References
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australia-kangaroos-culling-killing-murder-deaths-a-year-a7583186.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-38964535
https://www.feralscan.org.au/camelscan/pagecontent.aspx?page=camel_largepopulations
https://theconversation.com/culling-pest-animals-can-do-more-harm-than-good-40702
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140305-culling-badgers-deer-bison-swans-ethics-conservation/