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Comment by Sabinus | Hacker News Reader

Another good argument to reintroduce apex predators. Lyme and prion disease are nasty, and the US deer population is riddled with it.

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Apex predators can help, but in places like New Jersey (and hell, the entire Accela corridor) deer are incredibly overpopulated in places too dense with humans for apex predators to tolerate. In those places, we need aggressive bow hunting and culling. But the very noisy and politically powerful "don't shoot Bambi" crowd prevents this. You get sick deer and forests entirely devoid of saplings, and therefore at risk.

Hear hear. Hunting is ethical management. There are people willfully ignorant to that.

Screw the bow. Get a suppressed bolt action .300 blackout or 8.6 blackout.

The bow will make about as much noise.

Good luck with that suppressor in New Jersey [1].

Regarding the cartridge, while I generally prefer high velocity projectiles for whitetails without the silencer, when hunting suppressed I'm on board with subsonic, but IMO the best cartridge for that is big-bore (I personally use .44 magnum, bolt action like you suggest, 300 grain hollow-point at around 1050 fps). At that low velocity, you don't get much hydrostatic shockwave, so might as well make the biggest hole possible for an ethical kill. That lumbering freight train won't stop for anything, smashes right through bones. But even subsonic, it's a lot louder than a bow -- movie pew-pew just won't consistently put down something as big as a whitetail. Also note that at those low velocities, it's difficult to get bullets to consistently expand, so I do lots of terminal ballistics testing to find the optimal projectile and load.

For grandparent comment, too bad you have those hunting restrictions -- where I hunt, while this year's regs aren't out yet, for the last couple of years, anyone who wants to can shoot 12 deer per year (of which at most 2 can be bucks). They're trying to put a dent in the population, for various reasons including CWD, although I frankly think it's excessive.

[1]: https://www.silencershop.com/blog/post/suppressor-laws-by-st...

I shot a suppressed 308 with subs last weekend. The firing pin was louder that the report.

I seriously think a bow twang is louder

Shooting healthy bucks does nothing for disease management. How often do you choose the sickly ones? Predators are so helpful for this.

As the days get shorter, signs go up in Rock Creek Park saying that people should stay away at night, for hunters will be at work. I don't know how many deer they get every season.

Somebody on the neighborhood listserv has advertised candle-light vigils for the deer at an adjoining field, but I haven't seen that in a few years.

That makes a lot of sense, except for the possibility of infecting the predators. What if they end up as a stepping stone to infect humans as well?

If deer to human transmission is truly possible, then I would be worried about the possibilities here.

How would the wolves infect the humans though?

Lycanthropic vector.

Testing is hard because it only becomes evident once a month.

Canis lupus to Canis lupus familiaris transmission is pretty much guaranteed to be easy.

Sorry if this seems dumb, but how can apex fix cjd?

Perhaps what they meant was that CWD makes the infected animals more likely to be eaten. Then the apex would, over time, kill the affected subpopulation.

Not sure that this was meant and if that even makes sense.

Kill and eat the sick, reducing the spread of the disease.

Culling is vital to healthy populations and balanced ecosystems.

Animals don't have medicine, so the sick or diseased amongst them can spread susceptibility to illness more readily, over time making groups more genetically or immunologically prone in a way that could lead to destabilization, become vectors for contamination (some cancers are contagious, like in dogs, and prions don't break down easily, making them true ecohazards), or end up as vectors as they contact other animal populations (HIV and swine flu were non-human origin).

Predators also encourage migration of herds, so deer won't consume an environment to depletion, including crops.

Predation is nature's free labor!

There's a study that showed mountain lion (puma) can eat and digest CWD infected deer meat resulting in > 95% removal of prions. Don't quote that number though, some googling should find the study.

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