Wildlife needs to remain wild

Fred Voltz, Carson City

Monday, June 9, 2014 | 2 a.m.

A recent letter suggested wildlife-killing organizations with innocent-sounding names could positively impact the public’s wildlife.

Damage from Hurricane Katrina was greater than necessary thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers changing the natural flow of the Mississippi River, thereby depleting the wetlands buffer that would have absorbed some of the hurricane’s enormous force. Does man know better than nature? Does man effectively manage drought, lightning or earthquakes?

Man has certainly been successful in exterminating wildlife species by indiscriminate killing. When human-caused wildlife-killing proceeds in earnest, a predictable result occurs. As with humans, wildlife has a survival instinct. When threatened, wildlife species increase reproduction to counteract human predators.

Long before humans inhabited Nevada, species lived and died without any human intervention. A complex food chain hierarchy between the wildlife species sustains them. Man disrupts the hierarchy by indiscriminate killing.

Human wildlife killers should not try to hide behind their invented excuses that wildlife would rather die at the hands of a human looking for fun, profit and a testosterone surge vs. living their natural lives in the wild as undisturbed by humans as possible. Man needs to stop promoting the fiction that something wild can or should be managed.