Hunting white tail deer in Pennsylvania vs. Ohio

Introduction

For the vast, overwhelming majority of time in which human beings have existed—97% to 99% of the period since the first hominid appeared—they lived in a society commonly known as hunting and gathering. Many species of the Australopithecus and Homo practiced this form of survival, which also typified the lifestyle, social organization, and culture of Homo sapiens until relatively recently—that is, until the emergence of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago. Thus, hunting and gathering is often equated with the Paleolithic, or “Old Stone Age,” which ended with the Neolithic, or “New Stone Age” (some include a Mesolithic as well), although these terms are not universally accepted. Moreover, the line between agricultural and hunting and gathering societies is not always clear, as many societies relied on both as necessary (Clark, p.630).

Prior to agriculture, humans obtained sustenance through several modalities, including fishing, the hunting of animals, and the gathering of a wide variety of foodstuffs. Reliant on the sources made possible by their immediate environment, small groups of people, often as few as a dozen and rarely more than 50, wandered nomadically, following the seasonal rhythms of plants and migratory cycles of animals. Hunting has become an important activity of people's life. Nowadays, people not only limit themselves to hunting for the purpose of food but, hunting has become an activity and a hobby, as well.

Discussion

White Tail Deer Pennsylvania

When externalities exist, the resulting supply of the externality-producing good will differ from that associated with the maximization of net social benefits; the invisible hand of the free market will not lead all to the socially optimal result. In one of the earliest economic studies describing the value of wildlife, researchers estimated that the white tail deer herd existing in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, cost each farm in ...