You guys are making up the wildest stuff. How does the ceasation of breeding domestic animals for food affect wild animal populations??? Why would the Great Plains, the Southern Plains, and various mountain areas change their populations of wild animals if you stopped artificially inseminating domestic livestock? One has nothing to do with the other. Or are you saying that by having these areas vacant, it will cause all the naturally occurring wild animals to copulate and breed in an uncontrollable frenzy??
It isn’t a matter of artificial insemination (which, with cattle anyway, is pretty uncommon) Animals breed as they breed, if left to do so, and it varies greatly with the animals in question.
The areas mentioned are, for the most part, not useable for any human food production except grass-eating food animals.
Now, if they were emptied of domestic animals, there would be empty grasslands, because most grasslands are presently used to raise grazing domestic animals. Virtually all are, except for parklands.
Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. Wild animals are capable of very rapid reproduction if presented with an abundant food supply. Deer have two to three offspring per year. Cattle one to two. Buffalo one to two. I can’t say about sheep and goats. Hogs produce six or eight per litter and, if I’m not greatly mistaken, can produce two litters per year. Predators are capable of very rapid reproduction. Wolves and mountain lions produce substantial litters within two years of their own births. Bears can produce more than one cub per year, and do. Cattle and buffalo are capable of producing calves in approximately two years and three months of their own birth, sometimes earlier. Their calves are capable of producing calves in approximately two years and three months, and on and on. It really doesn’t take all that long for them to multiply into large numbers. Healthy, adult bovines like cattle or buffalo are exceedingly hard for predators to take down. The only serious reduction in their numbers predators can effect are killing the very young (and that’s chancey because mom is usually nearby), the injured and the ill. Human beings presently kill and eat cattle at somewhere between age one and two. So those don’t multiply. Cattlemen retain only somewhere between 10-15% for breeding stock, which keeps their numbers stable. Yet, the grasslands are full of them all the same. Unmolested, cattle will bear young for fifteen to twenty years. The numbers compound quickly.
Open grasslands with no domestic animals will absolutely fill up with wild animals. No one who lives in them could possibly doubt that. Woods would do the same, and nobody could really doubt that who lives in or near them. Wild hogs, in particular, are capable of reproducing in woodlands very rapidly. (There is no difference between a domestic pig and a razorback, except that the tusks of the former are removed early in life. Domestic pigs are potentially very dangerous even so.) Sometimes domestic hogs escape and become wild hogs. I have shot some myself, and they’re extraordinarily dangerous creatures. Most woods are not really useful for agriculture either, which is why they’re still woodlands.
So the question remains. Since grasslands are useless for any human food production (and thus, habitation) other than domestic animals, will they then be left to fill up with wild animals?
And if they are, will humans be able to successfully live in those places? In my opinion, we would not be able to do so.
I don’t think anybody is really going to want to adopt wild cattle for pets, nor wild hogs either. But really, if everybody became vegans, there would be no use at all for most of the great plains, the Ozarks, the Smokies and the Appalachians. So they wouldn’t really need to cull by any method, since wild animals would roam free in those areas and the people would move out. Predators, disease and injuries would cull the animals in the same way they did before people arrived in North America.
