Varmints And Victims

Download or read book Varmints and Victims written by Frank Van Nuys and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It used to be: If you see a coyote, shoot it. Better yet, a bear. Best of all, perhaps? A wolf. How we've gotten from there to here, where such predators are reintroduced, protected, and in some cases revered, is the story Frank Van Nuys tells in Varmints and Victims, a thorough and enlightening look at the evolution of predator management in the American West. As controversies over predator control rage on, Varmints and Victims puts the debate into historical context, tracing the West's relationship with charismatic predators like grizzlies, wolves, and cougars from unquestioned eradication to ambivalent recovery efforts. Van Nuys offers a nuanced and balanced perspective on an often-emotional topic, exploring the intricacies of how and why attitudes toward predators have changed over the years. Focusing primarily on wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and grizzly bears, he charts the logic and methods of management practiced by ranchers, hunters, and federal officials Broad in scope and rich in detail, this work brings new, much-needed clarity to the complex interweaving of economics, politics, science, and culture in the formulation of ideas about predator species, and in policies directed at these creatures. In the process, we come to see how the story of predator control is in many ways the story of the American West itself, from early attempts to connect the frontier region to mainstream American life and economics to present ideas about the nature and singularity of the region.

Download or read book Our Common Ground written by John D. Leshy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little-known story of how the U.S. government came to hold nearly one-third of the nation's land primarily for recreation and conservation.

Download or read book Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America written by Dan Flores and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America. In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

Download or read book Rodeo written by Susan Nance and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What would rodeo look like if we took it as a record, not of human triumph and resilience, but of human imperfection and stubbornness?” asks animal historian Susan Nance. Against the backdrop of the larger histories of ranching, cattle, horses, and the environment in the West, this book explores how the evolution of rodeo has reflected rural western beliefs and assumptions about the natural world that have led to environmental crises and served the beef empire. By unearthing behind-the-scenes stories of rodeo animals as diverse individuals, this book lays bare contradictions within rodeo and the rural West. For almost 150 years, westerners have used rodeo to symbolically reenact their struggles with animals and the land as uniformly progressive and triumphant. Nance upends that view with accounts of individual animals that reveal how diligently rodeo people have worked to make livestock into surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence in its history. Western horses and cattle were more than just props. Rodeo reclaims their lived history through compelling stories of anonymous roping steers and calves who inspired reform of the sport, such as the famed but abused bucker Steamboat, and the many broncs and bulls, famous or not, who unknowingly built an industry. Rodeo is a dangerous sport that reveals many westerners as people proudly tolerant of risk and violence, and ready to impose these values on livestock. In Rodeo: An Animal History, Nance pushes past standard histories and the sport’s publicity to show how rodeo was shot through with stubbornness and human failing as much as fortitude and community spirit.

Download or read book Creatures of Fashion written by John Soluri and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe's houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world." From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

Download or read book Kansas History written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Hunter's Confession written by David Carpenter and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2010-04-03 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Hunter's Confession tells the story of hunting in David Carpenter's life, including the reasons he once loved it and the reasons he no longer pursues it. When he was a boy, Carpenter and his father and brother would head out along the side roads and into the prairie marshlands searching for duck, grouse, and partridge. As a young man, he began skulking around the bushes with his hunting buddies and trudging through groves of larch, alpine fir, and willow in search of elk. Later, hunting became a form of therapy, a way to ward off melancholy and depression. In the end, as a result of a dramatic experience after shooting a grouse, Carpenter gave up hunting for good. Winding through this personal narrative is Carpenter's exploration of the history of hunting, subsistence hunting versus hunting for sport, trophy hunting, and the meaning of the hunt for those who have written about it most eloquently. Are wild creatures somehow our property? How is the sport hunter different from the hunter who must kill game to survive? Is there some sort of bridge that might connect aboriginal hunters to non-aboriginal hunters? Why do many hunters feel most fully alive when they