Heard a guy at the lumber yard say 'trees don't have feelings'

I was grabbing some new rope at the supply house on Tuesday and this older logger was telling a young guy that trees don't have feelings so stop babying them. It got me thinking about how we all treat trees different based on who taught us. I see some arborists that go way too rough on removals and leave nasty stubs while others are way too slow on a simple dead oak. Where do you draw the line between being efficient and being respectful to the tree?

2 comments

2 Comments

thomas86229d ago

Whoa hold up, you got a little mixed up there. A dead oak isn't gonna bounce back from anything, its already gone. The way you handle a dead tree is totally different from a live one. With a dead tree you're mostly worried about safety and getting it down without wrecking stuff, not about the tree's health because it doesn't have any. The whole "rough handling shuts them down" thing only really applies to live trees that can still respond to damage. If you hack up a healthy maple in the wrong season yeah you might cause it to struggle, but a dead tree doesn't care about any of that since its already done.

brooke53329d ago

Got me wondering though do you think that way of treating them has any actual effect on how the tree bounces back from a removal or is it more about the person's own peace of mind? I mean, I've seen trees get absolutely hammered with a chainsaw and still push out new growth like nothing happened, but then other times the same rough handling seems to just shut them down completely. Maybe it depends on the species or the time of year or something like that.

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