Vast majority of deer/elk meat probably end up on dinner plates in the US too.
Eeehhh, near as I can tell the vast majority actually doesn't. More around a plurality. A
lot actually goes to waste, either rotting on the side of the road (last numbers were >1 million deer/vehicle collisions over the course of a year, and that's around the average near as I can tell*) or discarded for various reasons (seen the average harvest from a deer ballparked at ~22kg -- where the low end of an adult white-tail by weight is around 40kg). Fair amount of a deer's meat just going to be thrown out.
Hunting
does probably get around two or three times (hunters kill ~6 million yearly, so estimating at ~half the weight per deer -- which is probably generous, as not every hunter even bothers to bring the meat back for eating at all, but whatever -- being brought back leaves their contribution ~3 million, pound for pound) what roadkill does (and, being fair, some of that roadkill actually gets eaten -- most states I'm aware of have programs where police or whathaveyou'll pick up deer if they get to them soon enough and let prisoners render them down), but between that and natural causes it probably only manages somewhere in the region of half or so.
*Fun fact, deer are basically the deadliest non-insect, non-human animal in the US, by a fairly substantial margin (mosquitoes appear to edge them out a fair bit if you're counting bugs, though). Over the course of a year, deer average something in a range of "every human death by bear in the 20th century" in body count (around 130), thanks to the little bastards turning roadways into impromptu collision testing venues.
For reference, it looks like the most consistent records we have for fatal wolf attacks comes from france, where they managed to average... about ten a year, over the period of 1200-1920. Asia looks like they're having the most trouble with actual bodycount in modern times, though... for all they still appear to be averaging about four a year (200 recorded in the 50 years leading up to '02).
E: Though, for the interested,
this looks like a pretty nice breakdown of deer fatalities and whatnot. S'possible hunting in fact represents
less than half the dead deer (nevermind the meat) in this country, maybe even fairly substantially.
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And nah, you don't need a human
on the battlefield.
Controlling whatever's on it, maybe, but outside of various ethical/societal concerns about the human cost of war being too cheap, there's really no particular
need to actually have flesh and blood being shot at. Even beyond airborne drones, there's already a fair amount of remote controlled or autonomous military devices under development and whatnot.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1578568 times)