@unknown

I’m not going to lower myself to just calling you names back, but I will defend my opinion. My assumptions are based on the facts I stated in the penultimate sentence of my post, and my invitation to prove me wrong was and still is open to anyone with rational conclusions to the contrary. As for my statement that rabbits are a natural part of the ecosystem – I still believe that is so. Annoyance of people wanting to protect their flower gardens aside, the only way animals or plants can be scientifically labelled as pests or weeds, respectively, is if they are invasive species that do not belong in an ecosystem and thus destabilize it (not including humans, since we wouldn’t label ourselves pests). Rabbits are part of the ecosystem and are depended upon by other creatures therein. If their natural predators happen to have been practically wiped out because they were once considered pests in their own right, that does not mean that their natural reproduction rate now makes them pests. My point is that while their levels should be kept in check, it should be done intelligently. People who spell out profanities with the corpses of their kills probably do not qualify to make good choices.

Look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t keep the little bastards in check, which is apparently what everyone is inferring from my statements. Yes, they are a problem because either humans have introduced them to islands where they don’t belong or simply turned their environment to shit. Unfortunately, the only ways to solve the resulting mess now is either to kill most of them off or to let them breed beyond the environment’s carrying capacity and starve to death. Obviously, the first solution is more preferable. In the case of their overbreeding in their own natural environement, there is a third even more preferable solution to reintroduce their natural predators.

If it is decided to keep them in check, then it should be done professionaly so as not to fuck the environment up even more. Remember passenger pigeons? They were so common that everyone thought “no way they’ll ever disappear” and used them for target practice. Oops! Guess they miscounted. Same thing could happen with any species, even one that breeds like rabbits. What do I mean by professionally? Well, to start, not by someone who arranges their kills into naughty words and proudly takes pictures with them. That’s just stupid. Anybody who does that to dead bodies, regardless of species, is not mature enough to care about the repercussions of their actions.

To use a metaphor – if you need somebody to, say, chop down part of a forest so that in the event of a wildfire the flames don’t spread to surrounding neighborhoods, then you get woodcutters who would select the trees that present the most danger and harvest the resulting wood for lumbermills. You would not put a couple of rednecks in a tank and let them roll over whichever trees they happen to hit and then let them make a giant phalus out of the resulting splinters.

I’m not sure how I contradicted myself there. My point is that there is a difference between professional and conservationist hunters and people who have big guns to shoot furry things with. Hunters might pose with a trophy kill, yes, but I highly doubt any self-respecting hunter would be caught spelling things out with it. It’s not the hunting that annoys me, it’s the (in my opinion) obvious disrespect for what they’re hunting. Yes, the rabbits are, at the time of the photo, just corpses, and it doesn’t really matter to them what happens after they’re dead. Point is, such behavior is still ethically repugnant and you can’t expect people that act disrespectfully toward their kills post factum to treat the responsibilities of their past-time any differently. They’re more likely to be the modern equivalent of the types that mowed down buffalo out of moving trains and then took photographs on veritable mountains of skulls.

I realize many will disagree with me (and already have), but my disgust for this sort of macabre humor did not let me sit silent.