Can anyone support sport hunting?

Great Debates
1

I will admit right off the bat that I am an animal lover. I love all of them…even the ones that aren’t cute. However, I am not a card carrying member of PETA and frankly think most of them are a bit off their nut. Neither am I a vegetarian and enjoy a good steak now and then and I really like wearing my leather jacket and most of my shoes are leather.

For a long time now I have held the position that while I don’t like the notion of sport hunting I support the rights of those who do like to do it if they so wished. If this seems odd think along the lines of free speech. I may not like everything a particular person has to say but I support their right to say it.

Some threads around here recently brought this to mind but now that I think about it I can’t remember why I adopted the position I have. The closest I have come is the notion that it is hypocritical for me to use animal products and then get mad at someone for killing an animal. However, I’m not so sure that is necessarily true (see below) and figured if any group can set this straight it’ll be the Dopers here.

As I said I have no issue with the use of animal products. Humans have been doing so since…well since there were humans. Further, mother nature doesn’t seem to take issue with killing other animals for food. It is part of the natural order of things. This is where I think I avoid being a hypocrite. If someone is hunting to feed and/or clothe themselves I have no problem.

Where I do start having a problem is in the killing of another creature for fun/sport. Is this really defensible? I have had some hunters tell me they are doing nature a service by thinning herds (in some areas for instance deer can get severly overpopulated). However, mother nature usually took care of such problems on its own naturally. Further, most hunters I know do not shoot the lame and weak animals…they want the prime bull, the 12-point buck. In this respect they are doing nature a disservice by taking the best DNA out of the gene pool.

Many hunters I know do eat what they kill saying this is no different than me eating a steak that someone else killed for me. However, my steak likely suffered far less. I have been through a slaughterhouse and they dispatched the animals extremely quickly with next to no pain. A hunter, barring a head shot, is likely to wound the animal than kill it outright. Depending on the shot they may put it out of its misery in short order or they may have to chase it awhile and they may even possibly lose it. Is their dead deer really on the same moral level as my beef? None of the hunters I have known need to hunt ot feed themselves. Frankly it is probably cheaper for them to buy meat at the store than go to the effort and cost it takes to go hunting (although maybe not…can’t say as I have done an economic analysis of it but be that as it may the people I know who hunt have zero problems feeding and clothing themselves via store bought items).

Am I missing something here?

[sub]NOTE: I have less of a problem if a sport hunter uses the animal they kill for food than if they just want a trophy. The ‘hunters’ that kill caged exotic animals I have absolutely zero tolerance for.[/sub]

2

Can anyone support it? I dunno. Some people enjoy it and it isn’t hurting any humans. Good enough for me.

3

Vegetarians value animal lives more than you. Sport hunters value them less. Why do you feel the need to judge other people’s values, and make your position the correct one?

4

Because if everyone thought like me the world would be a greta place to live!

Seriously though, I think it goes beyond how much a given person may or may not value something. Our society has animal cruelty laws. Collect a bunch of puppies, go in your back yard and start shooting them and see how long it takes the police to show-up and arrest you. It doesn’t matter that you value puppy lives not at all because society does and society will put you in jail for it.

Clearly society allows for sport hunting right now but that doesn’t necessarily make it ok. Society used to allow slavery and that wasn’t ok.

Animals killed to feed humans is one thing. Some vegans may go so far as to not want to kill any animal ever for food but till they get the lions to go vegetarian I’m not buying that it is morally wrong for us to kill animals for food. The animals we do kill for food should be dispatched in a humane fashion.

Animals killed for ‘fun’ is something else entirely in my mind. I don’t know why this is hard to understand. If sport hunting is just fine then why is dog fighting illegal nearly everywhere (if not everywhere) in the US? It isn’t hurting any humans (and if you say the occasional fighting Pit Bull occasionally causes some harm then I answer that the occasional hunting rifle gets people too).

5

Couple of notes:

The ways nature takes care of overpopulations of deer where I live include: starvation, mange, highways, and other diseases. Deer can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to cars on the highways every year, and even kill people. The diseases they carry can spread to other animals, and deer that are starving branch out into more populated areas (with more traffic, thus more car vs. deer accidents) to try to get food. They cause both monetary damage and human damage in terms of people injured or possibly killed in vehicle accidents involving deer.

Also, a deer’s antlers grow in each spring and are shed each winter. When the deer is young, the antlers are smaller, and as the deer gets older, the antlers get bigger. The ‘prime 12 point buck’ that you’re talking about is likely one of the old, sick ones that none of the does will want to breed with because he is too old. This is why PA game law has recently changed such that ONLY deer having four or more points on each side of their rack (translating to eight different one inch tines of bone sticking out of their heads) can be taken during deer season. They want to give the younger bucks the chance to mature.

With a note to the expense, most of the deer hunting equipment that I have was purchased long ago, so I’ll figure the expense over number of years that the equipment was used, as well as processing costs.

Long underwear and wool socks: $30
Flourescent orange insulated bib overalls: $100
Floursecent orange insulated coat: $100
Waterproof Insulated boots: $80
Waterproof Gloves: $30
Used Remington Model 700 with Leopould 3x9 power scope: $300

This adds up to a total initial cost of: $640
Since I had this equipment for 10 years without needing to replace any of it, that averages to $64/year.

Annual Costs:
Equipment Cost: $64
PA Resident Adult Hunting License: $12.75
Remington Ammunition in .280 hollowpoint: $20.00
Processing fee for deer at butcher: $100
Other costs (gas, gun cleaning supplies, etc): $100

Total: $296.75
Typical amount of meat in lbs: 100
Approximate cost per pound: $2.96

So for just under $300, I can provide myself with enough venison to be feed my family (4 people) for a year. If I figure that beef, on average, costs $5 a pound (to account for everything from steak to ground meat on sale), I’d have to spend $500 to get 100 lbs of beef in a year.

It’s a little less than double the price to replace 100 lbs of venison with 100 lbs of beef. Seems to fit economically to me.

BTW, this type of hunting, in which the animals are used for food, is by law considered ‘sport hunting’ in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

6

First off, arguments re: society are silly, as society does not necessarily have logically defensible positions.

It seems to me that either people have a default right to kill animals or they don’t. If you think that every act of animal-killing requires justification, I would refer you to the next fly you swat or tick you burn. If you can kill for comfort, why not kill for enjoyment?

7

What was the point of that? Clearly the OP is talking about hunting for pleasure, not food. Saying sport hunting is justifiable because it actually is hunting for food isn’t an argument, you’re just redefining terms.

8

Its how you feel when you kill something that matters.

Some people like it. I don’t. Gotten to the point where I feel bad about fishing.

9

IANAHunter, and I am an omnivore, so I look at this issue from the pespective of species depletion and conservation. I think hunting is a perfect example of an activity whose symbolic impact far outweighs its real impact on the environment. The emotions stirred in many people by the killing of animals for sport are understandable, but the real danger to wildlife generally is loss of habitat. Or putting it another way, it’s remarkable that hunting evokes such great revulsion and sympathy for the defenseless animals when the impact of the few percent of Americans who do it is minor compared to that of our increasing population and unending appetite for more living space.

10

Between you, who buys his meat and leather from a store, and a hunter, who goes out and actually shoots something, I’d say that the hunter has a greater right to animal products than you do, since he actually did the dirty work.

I don’t know of any sport hunters who kill something and then leave it there to rot. All the hunters I know make maximal use of the animal they kill, down to selling the pelt. They certainly eat all the meat. So while they may be doing it for their own enjoyment, it’s no more wasteful than the industrial processes for obtaining the animal products.

Given the above (and assuming that animal products are unobjectionable), what could possibly be wrong with sport hunting? The enjoyment? I’ve never met a hunter who liked killing; they’ve all said something like “I enjoy hunting”, where hunting means being outside, stalking an animal, killing it cleanly, and then making good use of it.

11

Because according to the law, SmackFu, sport hunting is what I do. It includes those hunters who eat their kill.

12

The power of life and death over all you survey: Priceless.

13

All of the pleasure hunters I know of consume their kill entirely; likewise, those who kill for food do so in the same mode as sport hunters (meaning, get a permit for deer season and go shoot something). They’re not discrete categories, as you imply.

14

But he’s not talking about those who eat and use the animal products. He’s quite clear in the OP that he is just referring to those to shoot just for fun and DON"T use the meat.

15

Indeed, there’s really no debate here; the kind of hunter that kills simply for the sake of killing and doesn’t use the animal doesn’t exist, or if they do, are shunned by legitimate hunters.

16

Do you really think the only suffering a production animal experiences is the slaughtering? How about the unspeakable day-to-day agony millions of meat production animals suffer for months or years before they’re killed “with next to no pain”? A wild animal lives free cabable of fulfilling its natural needs until the bullet (or as in my case, an arrow) kills it.

It is clear from your post that you have no idea of what happens to a game animal after it’s hit. A soft nose bullet plows such a hole through the vital organs that the animal dies, if not instantly, after mere seconds. From what ( human) survivors of such hits have told, the shock is so overwhelming that basically no pain is experienced, it comes only a while after the impact, when your average deer is already dead. If you were facing a death penalty, would you rather live decades in shackles behind bars on unnatural foods and inable to walk, run or mate when you want and then get a relatively painless hit in the brain or live your life the way you want and then take a slug that would take maybe 5-10 seconds to kill you?

17

catsix and Raygun99 are entirely correct in my experience. I’m unaware of a single hunting organization which condones hunting without finding a use for the take, except in the case of nuisance animals such as State-mandated deer-thinning (when actually done by the State) or of coyotes.

However, that’s the way it is in the United States these days, where substantially all animals hunted are healthful (or at least not unhealthy) for humans. That was not always the case here, before the wolfpacks diminished (only sometimes were they hunted as a nuisance animal), and is not always the case elsewhere, where hunting solely for trophys is still done or was done until quite recently.

So whilst Whack-a-Mole’s OP may be largely mooted in the 2003 United States, that doesn’t make it entirely without merit.

18

Yeah! Cuz, you know, animals gain weight quickest when they’re tortured. It’s all part of efficient production. Those beef herds you see standing in the field placidly chewing their cuds as you drive by on the highway? They’re outfitted with brain implants that directly stimulate the pain centres in their brains. Otherwise they’d just be standing contentedly chewing half-digested grass, and we couldn’t have that!

19

Ha-Ha! a farmer speaking, I presume. I wasn’t saying all the production animals lead miserable lives, just millions of them do. How about poultry that is force-fed? Cattle that are fed soy and animal parts instead of grass? Pigs that have their tails amputated so that they don’t chew them off each other in over-crowded stys? Animals that have been so over-bred that their bones won’t hold up under the muscle load? Long truck haulings of live animals into the slaughtering facilities where they can see, smell and sense the death of others before their own? I could go on and on and I haven’t even seen PETA’s website. You can’t even compare the brief pain experienced by a wild animal being hunted to the lives and deaths of production animals in even average conditions.

20

Well…you’re right I don’t know what precisely happens to an animal, or human, after they are hit by a bullet. However, are all bullets equal in their damage capacity? Are all rifles equal in their power? Does the hunter always strike the animal in the head or chest (i.e does the animal never get hit in the rear)? In short, are you saying that EVERY animal hit by a gunshot dies in 5-10 seconds EVERY time? What about bow hunters? Can they promise the same?

[quote]
Originally posted by Raygun99:
As to trophy hunters do they always pack out (say) 500 pounds of bear meat after a kill (I’m just guessing that a 1,200 pound bear equates to 500 pounds of meat [no bones, blood, etc.)? If you’re way out in the mountains is this even possible without a dozen hunters to share the load?

What about the stories you hear of hunters going to shoot caged exotic animals? That doesn’t happen? There are NO hunters who just want the trophy?

While a hunter might make good use of the animal they kill I sincerely doubt they make maximal use of it. Industrial slaughterhouses Do make maximal use of the animal. Literally the ENTIRE cow gets used. Blood, bones, brains…you name it. I sincerely doubt any hunter makes as much use of the animal they kill (just due to practical matters more than choice on their part).