ugggggh losing my mind cause like i get that it doesnt "feel right" to leave a vampire alive KNOWING that they eat people but like what are you going to kill EVERYTHING that eats people? cause thats just a lot of shit is all!!
the fact is as far as sapiovores go vampires are pretty fucking chill they only feed a few times a month and more than half the time they dont even kill their victims, so that really comes out to less than 12 bodies a year, and thats assuming high pressure from vampire hunters- if left to their own devices, there are new studies that suggest fatalities can be MUCH lower.
which again doesnt SOUND ideal BUT you have to remember:
vampires keep large territories
vampires do not share their territories even with vampires of other sexes
vampires self-regulate their populations through territorial aggression and even deliberately kill each other's fledglings
(vampires also self-regulate in the other direction by the way, meaning killing them often results in the remaining vampires 1. becoming more savvy 2. reproducing at higher rates to make up the lost population and 3. hunting more aggressively to feed their young who also grow up with heightened hunting activity like that normalized)
VAMPIRES ALSO DEFEND THEIR LARGE TERRITORIES AGAINST HETEROSPECIFIC SAPIOVORES THAT AVERAGE MUCH HIGHER BODYCOUNTS. so you can have 2-5 vampires actively hunting in all of NYC (not counting fledglings/other dependents, which studies show dont actually lead to significantly more lethal hunting) or you can have up to 15 separate werewolf packs PLUS all the competitors that werewolves dont take out but that vampires absolutely do like ghouls, cryptids, and various opportunistic sapiovores
many non-obligate sapiovores have also been shown to avoid human prey when vampires are present to avoid becoming targets
its not a perfect solution but in the real world we dont have the resources to protect every human. leaving an established population of vampires (more centennials, fewer freshly fledged individuals) has reduced supernaturally originating fatalities in every province its been trialed in.
plus, vampire fatalities are and have been VERY low for a long time. weve BEEN fighting vampires for generations with very little progress- just other species caught in the crossfire and HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars wasted on a problem that persists in public imagination because its intrinsic unsolvability makes it an inexhaustible political resource. and in the meantime in areas where they have made "progress," even when the eradication efforts THEMSELVES havent been more of a hazard to human health than the problem theyre theoretically meant to solve, either the population bounces back as soon as victory is declared or OTHER SHIT MOVES IN and it becomes an urban fantasy warzone.
the world is a garden, not a bouquet. you cant have the parts you like without the dirt and the thorns. the nice parts have to come from somewhere and thats what ecology is. i ALSO wish it could be different, trust me, but right now were better off accepting that we live with vampires and turning out attention to how we can coexist with them.
