This story stands out in my mind because we're basically living through the same thing albeit as human beings. There was plenty, and a relatively peaceful world to live in for a while. Or at least a relatively clean world. Now we're seeing the pressure cracks of society being pushed further apart by our own overpopulation.
I forgot to respond to this last time, or didn't due to missing it. Yes, with humans the difference is that we can theoretically live and accommodate the population, in a physical and resource/space sense, but apparently we can't in the realm of psychology, politics, and overall harmony because we are so complex. I think it's also because we fall prey to emotions and "caring" for other humans beings, even abstractly, in ways animals wouldn't think twice about. Plus, what happened in one year or one season for your squirrels was able to span 50+ years for us humans, which further complicates the analysis of the subject - we think we can help, subsidize or acommodate the expanding population but with their demands, greed, and envy it turns out that no we really can't. Or, the cherry on top, the elites get sick of it and make policies to cause discord and then pull the monetary plug, inflate while most don't have assets, etc.
The skewed gender ratio due to men not dying young (or at least getting maimed) nearly as often is one aspect of this. I think I might've touched on that before. But that's a point that deserves its own post.
If you know my posts, along with the above is that I posted always (I'm sure I put this in post 1 of this thread) that M:F ratio and excess resources are the biggest quality inducers or selection pressures on women. Fewer males and worse economy of course, make them way better, which makes for way higher production of children, at least per capita. Now we have women working, more and fatter women, and fake jobs, and no one having kids while also have to pay for the older people who control the biggest voting bloc, and just don't care anymore or understand that younger people mostly have no future or demoralized, and they definitely don't care that the women they raised don't care about men at all.
A while back I was trying to explain to another coworker that since brith rates tend to decline in industrialized nations no matter the culture, all we really have to do is wait out the slowing of births while we incorporate the high tech that off sets the need for unskilled labor. It would require a more patient and educated society to actually work, however. He couldn't handle it, he was a PC SJW through and through and just kind of went "hmmm, interesting" in the way that NPCs typically do upon encountering a thought that isn't pre-approved by the talking heads. Not to suggest that I must be right, mind you, just saying that he couldn't even engage the thought at all. Glad we can talk about this more objectively here.
Your seeing the death pangs of the workers unite crowd, who are mostly collectivist since they needed to be; they were the automatons of old. But they're people, so you have connections with them, and even if you don't care about them as people you do if you care about them as people/voters for your cause. Also, your friend implicitly doesn't like this because most of them are either Dem type voters, less competent minorities, or both.
Yes, and as above, you know how many older people die with savings of over than 1M from pensions and excessive retirement earnings? Yet they still worry.
Still, the bigger part that the western countries don't talk about is the feminism part. The proof is that I both know many really wealthy men, successful guys, tall guys, etc - they can all afford houses and families, etc - but there aren't women for them, really. Yes, with better economics more people would have had kids, but it's just at the margins. The rate limiting step is women foregoing families for career and just desiring crazy levels of consumption, stupid costs in housing, and demanding a ton from men. All the while, they aren't young, so why would a man spend on them? He won't. By the time he HAS all that $ (in his 30s) the society does all it can to try to get to marry the washed up ones (30+), not the young ones he thought he was working hard to get.
