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Show 263. with deer. Only Man's domestic sheep did that, and only because men led them. I recall skiing high on a plateau in Utah and coming across a domestic sheep in the snow. He was clearly starving, and it was only February. Unlike the deer, he didn't have the sense to walk five miles off the mountain by himself. And he had missed the herder's truck five months earlier. What a stupid animal, I thought. And so Muir thought when he herded sheep. Really, though, it was Man who usurped the niche which deer occupied. So why should men be angry when a coyote or bear decided to eat the more easily captured sheep who replaced the deer? There is no "safe" place in Nature. All concepts of natural selection which depend on food sources eventually have to face the so-called "Malthusian death struggle," where "balanced order, according to [Maithus] , must rest on the most unfortunate imbalance, created deliberately by God, between population and resources." Muir had trouble facing this prospect in his own life, where bread was often scarce; he refused to see it as a law of Nature. Instead he suggested that scarcity was a problem which obsessed Man more than animals, "although tame men are slow to suspect wild sheep of seeing more than grass." Muir's blindness was great in this regard. He never showed any full understanding of Population dynamics, or the role of predation in stabilizing the relationship between population and food source. In a passage from First Summer in the Sierra, he continued |