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Gamekeepers & Vermin Some people call animals vermin for competing with human interests, particularly economic interests. For instance gamekeepers, farmers and ranchers call any animal vermin that harms their stake of maximising the number of game animals to shoot (like deer, pheasants or partridges) or the number of livestock for the market. Vermin (or varmints) are often predators, such as coyotes, dingoes, foxes, African wild dogs, stoats and wildcats, and raptors such as eagles, hawks and falcons. Brown rats, house mice and some other rodents can pose health problems to humans and spoil human food are also called vermin. Great effort and expense is made to kill-off vermin. Farmers and ranchers in the US kill coyotes, even though the money spent on killing them exceeds the cost of the damage they do according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, gamekeepers succeeded in extirpating some raptor species and nearly killed-off all the wildcats, polecats and pine martens, too.
Perception of animals as vermin is variable. For example, a profitable business existed in Britain in rabbit skins and meat up to the 1950's. But then after someone introduced myxomatosis the rabbit numbers plummeted and subsequently the rabbit industry collapsed. The lethal rabbit disease swept through the country and killed off most rabbits. Thereafter rabbits were seen largely as vermin, an economic burden to be eradicated for the damage they caused. One such damage was eating pasture that cattle might otherwise eat. Vermin is a derogatory term. People use it who are ignorant of the place in nature of Homo sapiens and the role of competition among species. Competitor is a more appropriate and enlightened term for species in competition with each other. ›› To Entries & Home |
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