Max384, you are not the only one with this view. I feel killing the animals is the easy way out. When people resort to this they really did not exhaust the deter option at all. What about when you kill the animal who just took one of your fish to go back to feed its young, now they will most likely die by starving to death. Forget the pond thing for a minute, we have coyotes in the area and we have our cat who goes outside, if the cat gets eaten by the coyote then the coyote is not wrong. I as the owner of the cat is wrong and the coyote did nothing to deserve to die. My dog runs into the road and gets hit by a car should I kill the driver? ( I no this is extreme but making a point) As you say you will do anything to save your animals. In this case also the car owner did nothing wrong, I did not protect my animals and allowed them in this bad situation. We could really get into a big debate about killing things and that really was not my point for this thread.
Emotions obviously play a large role in your opinion on this matter. To me, it's not about wrong or right. I'm not killing an animal because I think that animal is wrong or evil or what have you. I'm killing an animal to save my animals. No offense, but your example about the driver is quite ridiculous and frankly pretty insulting to me, as it insinuates that my response is out of revenge, not to save my animals. This couldn't be further from the truth. Killing the driver would not protect any animals and wouldn't bring the cat back. It would only be done out of anger and revenge. Quite to the contrary, killing an animal that preys on mine would be done to save future lives. I do hope you see the error in your analogy.
And for the record, I've fortunately never had to kill any wildlife to save my pond critters.
My point was if we build something for our enjoyment then other animals should not have to die because of that, I personally could not even enjoy sitting by my pond anymore knowing I killed animals because of my man made pond. There are many ways to protect your fish before a gun or whatever means. However people will not educate themselves on how to do it and build the pond accordingly. Someone mention a net but a certain type of net that will not harm the animal, this is what my whole post is about, educate yourself so what ever you do will have the least amount of impact on animals for something we do on my property.
Like I said, I'd rather deter than kill an animal (except for hunting for food, which I do, but that's an entirely different subject), but if deterrents don't work, the animal's gonna go, not my fish. I'm going to try the deterrent route, but I'm not going to lose fish after fish trying new deterrents. So I may not exhaust all deterrent options before resorting to killing the offending animal, but I'm just not willing to have my fish sit around and play bait while I figure out ways to deter. Where you seem to focus on the killing aspect, I'm focusing on the saving aspect, which can't be denied. Death is a part of life. It may not be fair for the predator... But it's also not fair for the fish that we artificially put in a pond. But really, it's not about fairness at all. If something is going to die, I'd rather it be the pest, as it were, than the fish that I've brought to my pond and spend significant time and money raising.
There are many pond owners this year that lost fish during this harsh winter (some lost all), most are just like well I will just add more fish but a heron comes and takes then it must die, why? Just get more fish.
I personally built my pond as a source of enjoyment and for all wildlife to come to it and if I had to kill things to achieve this then that enjoyment would no longer exist.
I'm not saying this is the wrong attitude, because it's not. It just runs contrary to mine. But in my opinion, if you're just getting more fish, than you're allowing your pond to be used as a buffet. This is fine if that is what you're comfortable with, but not doing all that you can do to protect your fish is indirectly killing them. So, no matter how you slice it, you're either going to contribute to your pond life being killed or the predator being killed. You can obviously justify it by saying the predator has the right to kill to sustain itself, and that the fish are just for enjoyment. However, no matter what the purpose of the fish are, they're still living creatures that are there because you put them there, and thus being killed because of your choice to keep them. So, this is very much so a double-edged sword. It's not as cut and dry as killing or not killing. Inaction can be just as deadly as action.
