Kaibab is an example of how a landscape’s apparent abundance can turn into ecological collapse when people remove the relationships that sustain it. A campaign intended to conserve deer by killing their predators upset the balance between the animals and their food supply; the deer multiplied, exhausted available browse, and suffered greater losses from starvation than predators had previously caused.

Setting and Ecological Balance

The account places Kaibab in Arizona and presents its deer population as once in equilibrium with its environment. Wolves, pumas, and coyotes kept the deer from exceeding the food available to them. Predation was not an outside disturbance to that balance but one of the forces that maintained it.

The deer’s fate is set alongside another example of disrupted control: efforts to eliminate coyotes had brought plagues of field mice, animals the coyotes had formerly kept in check. Together, the examples show how removing a predator can redirect pressure through an ecosystem rather than simply eliminate a perceived problem.

The Conservation Campaign and Its Reversal

A campaign began with the stated aim of conserving deer by killing their enemies. Once the predators were gone, the deer population increased prodigiously. The intervention therefore achieved a numerical increase in the animals it sought to protect while removing the constraint that had kept their population within the limits of its food supply.

As the deer searched for food, the browse line on trees rose higher and higher. This visible change marks the widening consequences of the campaign: scarcity was no longer only a pressure on the deer, but a force reshaping the vegetation they depended on.

Consequences and Significance

In time, many more deer died of starvation than had formerly been killed by predators. Their desperate search for food also damaged the wider environment. The contrast between predator-caused deaths and the later losses from starvation reverses the campaign’s apparent logic: protection from natural predators did not secure the deer’s welfare when it severed the ecological limits on their growth.

Kaibab thus anchors the book’s broader argument that animal populations and their predators are interdependent. Its lesson is not merely that a particular intervention had unintended effects, but that conservation pursued by removing one part of a living system can intensify harm to the very population it is meant to preserve.