It gets even more complicated. Deer for instance, cause some property damage, sure but nothing like hogs obviously. HOWEVER, if there are to many, they’ll eat up all sorts of plants all winter that other animals and insects depend on in the spring. When state environmental authorities set bag limits, it’s not only to preserve a species, they’re also depending on hunters to remove a certain amount.
Snow geese were a huge problem for a while because they’d migrate far up north, and spend all summer picking apart vegetation on small islands. Vegititaiton that takes forever to grow up there, and was important to making sure some of those islands didn’t erode away… which they did. So near me while the daily bag limit for most birds was 2/day, for those snow geese it was like 25, with no limit on the season.
A good portion of what drives this are things like urban sprawl, etc, but there is no way to remove ourselves from the environment, which means we should do your best to maintain it. Most of these limits and programs are set by highly dedicated people who usually have advanced degrees in a field that pays very poorly. They do it because they care, so I tend to trust them.
I get hunting is unpalatable to a lot of people, but predation is an important part of how ecosystems balance. Left to their own devices these things certainly would stabilize, but the “new normal” may not be pleasant. Those plants excess deer population decimate over the winter may be important to an insect population, which is an important food source for a specific bird during it’s migration, that is important to balancing a beetle that decimates a specific tree species later in that birds migratory path or something. So that deer population becomes important to several other species and ecosystems across a broad range.
I’m not really qualified to talk about specifics, but it was really eye opening talking to an ornithologist friend of mine.
edit: another for instance on deer: When tag limits are placed, you usually get something like 2 bucks and maybe 8 does or something (depending on region, what the environmental authority saw doing surveys etc). This isn’t just to preserve bucks, it’s also that environmentally, it’s important to remove more does. Again my point being these hunting limits aren’t just permission to a hunt a species, but a request that a species is hunted.
That’s the part that people don’t get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it’s upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren’t that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.