One man's varmint is another man's Bambi. Neighbors often view the bowman with razor-tipped arrows in a tree above a deeryard with a certain trepidation. Aerial culls, usually from helicopters, may require either regulatory consent or a sanctioning legislative act. It's asking a lot of a motorist to be misty-eyed about the accident-causing animal decapitated by the side of the road as the tow-truck hauls his totaled car to the bone yard.
A young mother may not be particularly romantic about the water moccasin in the downspout near the sandbox. Ask a farmer to be understanding about wolves or coyotes decimating his cattle or sheep, and he may respond by asking what you do not understand about his single-slug theory from a .243.
(And your correspondent is less indulgent today of the black bears that annually mark his remote log cabin as theirs than he was when they first happened upon it 30 years ago.)
The nation can boast of astounding successes with animals: the defeat of the lamprey eel in the Great Lakes; the nurturing of the bald eagle back from the brink; the return of certain species of finfish; and, with more work and some luck, maybe the salvation of the oyster.
And happily hiding out in an Arkansas swamp, there may be after all some ivory-billed woodpeckers - long thought extinct.
Yet we urbanize and suburbanize. And we tinker with the balance of nature (we often call tinkering in the animal world "wildlife management"). As with so much, tinkering in nature begets more tinkering. It never ends.
Regarding deer, for instance, neither annual hunting seasons nor efforts at contraception seem to reduce roadkill - or loss of human life. Nothing short of drastic seems to keep mama bear and her cubs from gamboling on the deck.
And the ages-old tension between man and Nature - the beat with the beasts - goes on.