Quote Originally Posted by Bulldog Psion View Post
That's true, but only if we assume that dragon families and psychology are identical to humans.
Which they are, at least in the case of the one dragon family we've seen in the Stickverse. As for a mechanism that keeps dragon numbers down, they live a long time and breed very slowly--it doesn't need many to die via heroic action (or even in accidents--a black dragon could be killed by a massive landslide nearly as easily as a human) to keep the numbers down.