The morality of hunting
In one of my graduate classes, we recently read an essay defending hunting. An interesting conversation ensued on my class's discussion board (naturally, one that I plunked myself in the middle of), and I'm curious to hear other opinions on the subject. This conversation is still ongoing, so I might add to this post, but for now, I think my opinions were stated succinctly enough that I'm comfortable posting it.
Classmate 1:
While I respect the point the author was trying to make, I do not agree with him. I feel like this article was written to justify hunting for sport and prove that hunters were not immoral in their pursuits. There was one quote especially that stood out that I did not like. It says, "It is sometimes said thathunters are cruel, insensitive, and barbaric. In fact, however, the hunter may experience life and death deeply." I understand hunting for necessity. I realize that protein is essential for our survival and meat is the most efficient way to consume it. I do not, however agree with hunting for sport. It seems wasteful and cruel. What right do we have to disrupt the animal's way of life? What makes our leisure activities more important than their life? I do not hunt, so I can't say for sure but I imagine it's true that the hunter does "experience life and death deeply" since they are so near it, but it seems highly improbably for me that they respect life and death.
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Me:
What I really disliked is while he complained greatly of how hunters are villified, he went to great lengths to villify the anti-hunters. This part particularly bothered me:
"A moral criterion is sometimes offered for killing limited to the necessity for food and defense. This logically opposes the sportsman and approves of the slaughterhouse."
His logic there is so faulty, I don't even know where to start. Firstly, opposing the "sportsman" does not equate to opposition of hunting. I oppose hunting for sport, but understand it if it is a matter of necessity. (My mother grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and her family so poor they had dirt floors in their home. They hunted so they would not starve. My mother had her own "squirrel gun" and hunted with the boys, but was always saddened by the necessity of the kill, and to this day is staunchly against hunting for sport.) "Sportsman" by definition means someone who hunts because he sees it as sport, as a game, as FUN, not a necessity. The essay confuses this with hunting in general, which bothered me greatly.
Secondly, approving of killing out of necessity does not necessarily equate to approval of the slaughterhouse. I know people who find the sort of hunting my mother's family did acceptable, but who are vegans because they are so appalled by slaughterhouses. In a far less extremist sense, I know many people who only buy from local butchers who aquire their meat from humane local farmers. This is a far cry from "slaughterhouses" which I think the author uses as a buzz word to further villify anti-hunters.
In all, I think his arguments are more about stirring up controversy than about making a truly logical defense. As is the case when I get in this debate with sport hunters, he seems unable to counter arguments like those I mentioned above, and thus relies on the same subtle name-calling he accuses anti-hunters of.
I am wholly against killing animals for sport. But I fished a great deal with my father growing up, because we were poor and those fish constituted 50% of our dinners. (Trust me, you grow sick of perch and bluegill after a while.) And I don't think my mother's family deserves condemnation for what they did. But when my father-in-law gets decked out in thousands of dollars' worth of camo equipment to go shoot a buck because he wants antlers mounted on his wall, I'm nauseated. The man makes a respectable middle-class income and hunts because he thinks it's fun. He will eat a bit of the meat, but not much. Most of it gets tossed. That's just not right. And it's a reflection not on this great connection with nature [the essay's author] seems to think the hunter finds and respects, but rather of the wasteful, selfish culture of modern America.
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Classmate 2:
While I can appreciate why some people do not approve of hunting as a sport, I cannot understand why they believe it is not necessary. Due to hunters, many parts of the country have become well populated and balanced with a variety of wildlife. I know that my sound ironic, but hunters help control the population, especially of the old and weak.
Growing up on a Kansas farm in the fifties and sixties, we never saw deer or antelope on the High Plains. Now, decades later, the prairie is plentiful -- sometimes too much now as evident by the wrecked cars and fatalities. Also at that time coyote bounties were plentiful, and thus began a decade of over-population of jackrabbits. Our car tires would hit them as easily as a windshield would hit a moth.
One extremely dry summer at Cheyenne Bottoms, a water fowl preserve located in the center of the state, the water disappeared. With the water went the pelicans, geese, ducks and cranes, and people complained claiming mismanagement. But the balance shifted. The Bottoms got more mice and other small rodents, thus came more snakes, coyotes, hawks and eagles. Leave the deer population alone, and you justmay find more coyotes or wolves and traffic fatalities.
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Me:
"Also at that time coyote bounties were plentiful, and thus began a decade of over-population of jackrabbits. Our car tires would hit them as easily as a windshield would hit a moth."
I don't think I understand this statement - aren't coyotes natural predators of jackrabbits? Coyotes being plentiful would not lead to an overpopulation of rabbits, because they exist as a natural check to overpopulation. If the two coincided (plentiful coyote population and plentiful jackrabbit population) it can't be "blamed" on the plentiful coyote population. (The flow would only go the other way - plentiful prey leads to food enough to sustain the coyotes. But if the coyote population is decimated, the rabbits would breed unchecked, leading to even more of those traffic incidents.) It seems sort of like that "high ice cream sales correlate to increased crime rate" reasoning that most of us probably heard about as undergrads.
Also, I think the statistics are against the idea of the American/modern approach to hunting helping to balance the ecosystem. Think of all the species we have hunted out of existence, or to near-extinction. Just like paranoid (or sport) hunting of the natural predators (wolves, coyotes, big cats, bears) has led to the overpopulation of deer. The hunters' answer to this is to ignore the source of the problem and say they're doing the humane thing by "helping" with the deer overpopulation. But if you cut a big hole in a bag of sugar, the solution isn't to pick up a few grains from the floor here and there. It's to patch the hole. (Like with the re-introduction of wolves that has proven so successful.) Only when we are willing, as human beings, to take responsibility for the horrible wrongs we have done to the natural balance (yes, largely through foolish hunting) and try to correct those will hunting become less villified, or perhaps even accepted as a natural part of the environmental balance.
And I've just never been a fan of the "we hit them with our cars, let's hunt them instead" mentality. Yes, traffic fatalities are a horrible shame, but the number of animals killed in traffic collisions compared to the number of humans killed in animal-involved collisions is far higher. But most people are so used to driving past roadkill that they just don't care. They didn't start living on our roads, we chose to build our roads in their home. I'm not anti-progress, but I think we have to accept the risks that come with plunking progress in the middle of the wild. It's not fair that we expect every other creature on the planet to bend to our wills, just because we want it that way.