(Emphasis added.)
Once again, I trust you are ready to recant, happily, your position of accusing these kind of people of being abnormal?
Definitely the ‘trophy’ aspect of it! There is far too much enjoyment taken in the parting a tiger’s head from the rest of it’s body, just for proof of their kill. Give the animal some dignity at least, and take a fucking photo.
So you are in fact more upset about what they are thinking than what they are doing. That seems odd.
No, because I don’t do ANY of them now. I can’t even get satisfaction from a KFC or a bacon sarny anymore. I just chew them mindlessly to fill a gap.
So an innocent animal is brutally dispatched not so you can enjoy it, but just so that you can mindlessly chew it. I applaud your moral superiority!
Do not mock bacon here! We take our bacon mighty seriously in these here parts!
(Oh, did I welcome you to the SDMB? If not, I sincerely do now.)
Relax Paul. Have a beer, or go out dancing and chat up one of the local ladies.
So you do eat meat? Or you don’t? Or, are you saying that you do, but you just don’t enjoy it?
I think we’re done here.
(at least I am)
Are you equating my eating a Big Mac with relish( but no mayo!), to shooting a magnificent, or not-so creature, so I can display it for bragging rights somewhere? If so, I’m glad you are done. Bye!
Leave domesticated animals out of this “debate” please. A wild dog bears only a vague physical resemblance to it’s domesticated cousin, the labradoodle. Wild turkeys and boars are not anything like a farm raised hog or turkey.
And just because you couldn’t manage to track a cheeseburger through the wilds of suburbia doesn’t mean that all people have lost the ability to hunt, fish or otherwise obtain meat that isn’t wrapped and waiting for you at the local supermarket.
So I ask again, you are concerned about the state of mind of a person when he kills an animal? If so why?
I was going to say–does anyone even shoot big game anymore? I thought that went out with putting quinine in tonic water to combat the malaria.
Years ago, while was still habituating the Imperial Palace when in Vegas, the Big Game Hunting Show was in town.
Oh, yes people still do it. Lots of money is spent, and in Central-Asian countries you have barely heard of too.
Not to answer for anyone else, but yes…I am concerned as to why someone would get satisfaction or joy or anything related to happiness from killing an animal for any reason but fear, self defense or survival.
QFT
What is the OP’s definition of “big game”? Elephant or elk? Guided African hunts don’t impress me at all, but elk hunting is hardly unfair to the critters.
I hunt elk every year and get one about every 5. They aren’t cattle, they have keener senses than we do and know their environment. Large portions of the herd would starve every winter if they weren’t thinned and hunting provides most of the money the state department of wildlife gets.
And they taste really good, too.
So you propose to do what to make sure hunters are thinking as you would have them think? Do you propose some practical policy, or are you just venting?
Yes, pretty much. In both cases you are deriving pleasure from use of the dead body of an animal. (I am presuming you enjoy a Big Mac more than chewing on the flesh of a living cow.)
But if one can accept that it is morally justifiable to have someone else kill a large-bodied prey species like a cow so that you can derive pleasure from eating its flesh, it can be equally justifiable to kill a large-bodied prey species like a caribou or elk so you can derive pleasure from displaying its hide on a wall.
But the death of the animal is a necessary part of the experience you wish to enjoy. You don’t want to eat an animal alive* anymore than you want to skin it alive. The animal dies as part of the process.
I think I would agree that there might be something wrong with killing animals for no other reason than to kill something, but most hunters that I have spoken with have a rather strong ethic against wasteful or sadistic killing.
Regards,
Shodan
*Yes, I’ve heard the one about the pig with the wooden leg.
A toy poodle is not an efficient hunter, at all. Nonetheless, it has the instinct to hunt, and if one were to get loose in the guinea-pig section of the local petstore it would be very likely to indulge that instinct to the detriment of the guineapigs, unless a human intervened to control that instinct.
Wolves are smaller than some dog breeds, larger than many others. They are also a different species with different behaviour. So what? Is it non-sequiter season again?
No, he’s not. Others seem able to read my sentences, so I must assume the difficulty is with your reading skills. Since when is ‘most’ vague language? It’s no more imprecise than your ‘average’ dog. I don’t require you to define whether you mean a modal, median, geometric mean or arithmetic mean average, hence I don’t see why you expect a statistical breakdown and peer-reviewed cites from me. Dogs generally have a strong hunting instinct, just like humans generally have a strong sex instinct. The fact that there may be some individuals who lack that instinct, or that the instinct can be controlled well enough that we can get through a day in the office without fornicating by the photocopier, does not mean that instinct is not there and capable of driving behaviour.
At the end of the day, dogs are carnivores that still display instinctive hunting behavours, which often manifest in the unprompted (by hunger or human encouragement) killing of other animals. For you to insist otherwise makes you wonder exactly what kind of dogs you have been interacting with during your 46 years, and where I can get one - it would be ideal for my mother since it would prevent any more unfortunate incidents like the recent ‘terrier mauls chicken’ bloodbath.
Actually, you’d almost certainly be healthier if you cut out steak in favour of vegetable protein and the occasional piece of fish or some eggs. Unless the hamburger is unusually good-quality, even more so for that. Be better for the environment too. I wish I could cut down on my red meat consumption but I lack the willpower :mad:
Returning to the OP - I do find the whole trophy taking/displaying aspect to be faintly repellent, although I do understand some of what lies behind it. It might have been a big attraction to me when I was a kid, but now it just seems rather silly and pointless. Doubly so if you’re just killing something for the sake of being able to say “Look! I killed that!”. Having said that - when my parents lived in Africa (back in the sixties) one of their friends would shoot the occasional zebra for dog food, and make rugs from the hide. I’m not entirely sure where that sits on the “utilitarian” Vs “being a dick” scale - it seems a bit off but I can’t really articulate why.
One of my biggest objections to hunting in general and trophy or big-game hunting in specific is the strongly negative effects it has on overall health, population structure and species-specific behavior (especially in lek-breeding species) of almost all large-animal prey. In general, human hunting of large game is biased to healthy adult animals, and trophy hunting in particular is biased to larger (and therefore older and healthier) adult males, particularly those with unusually pronounced secondary sexual characteristics (bigger horns, larger mane, etc); in other words, the prime breeding stock. Furthermore, preferential removal of males leads to distorted sex ratios among the remaining population, which can have seriously deleterious consequences in and of itself.
Even in the case of abundant species where artificial population control is required to prevent overpopulation, discretionary hunting (as opposed to directed culling) produces smaller, less healthy animals with more abnormal traits, as compared to populations still undergoing natural predation or directed culling (i.e., preferential removal of abnormal or sickly animals).
To be clear, I have no objection to hunting animals per se. But in the case of a wild population, the long-term health of that population should be the primary consideration, NOT the preferences or desires of the individual hunters. Trophy hunting in particular should be strictly regulated to ensure that it does not seriously disturb the sex and age structure of the population and that sufficient “trophy” animals are left as breeding stock.
Hunting for subsistence or for population control should be in concordance with management strategies that preserve the genetic and behavioral structure of the population, which may require incentives to harvest animals of a less preferred age/sex/phenotype or penalties for harvesting animals that should be retained. In the extreme case, discretionary hunting may have to be suspended to allow for directed culling for one or more seasons (many whitetail populations in the US could benefit immensely from a few seasons of directed culling).
The primary literature on this topic is, as for most scientific topics, largely not publicly available; here’s the only relevant cite that I could find in a few minute’s searching that was free (warning: not written for a lay audience):
DW Coltman, P O’Donoghue, JT Jorgenson, JT Hogg, C Strobeck and M Festa-Bianchet. “Undesirable evolutionary consequences of trophy hunting.” Nature 426 (2003): 655-658. Available as a PDF from Dr Coltman’s website.
Abstract:
Phenotype-based selective harvests, including trophy hunting, can have important implications for sustainable wildlife management if they target heritable traits. Here we show that in an evolutionary response to sport hunting of bighorn trophy rams (Ovis canadensis) body weight and horn size have declined significantly over time. We used quantitative genetic analyses, based on a partly genetically reconstructed pedigree from a 30-year study of a wild population in which trophy hunting targeted rams with rapidly growing horns, to explore the evolutionary response to hunter selection on ram weight and horn size. Both traits were highly heritable, and trophy-harvested rams were of significantly higher genetic ‘breeding value’ for weight and horn size than rams that were not harvested. Rams of high breeding value were also shot at an early age, and thus did not achieve high reproductive success. Declines in mean breeding values for weight and horn size therefore occurred in response to unrestricted trophy hunting, resulting in the production of smaller-horned, lighter rams, and fewer trophies.
Other cites on request, although no guarantees as to public availability.
JRB, biologist (although admittedly not a wildlife biologist)
I’m going to submit here that anyone who eats meat but rags on hunters is being hypocritical, even if they don’t really acknowledge or realize it. An animal had to die for your meat, usually in ways that make a clean heartshot in the field look as peaceful as intravenous euthanization. Someone had to kill that animal so you could have that cheeseburger. So even though your hands are literally clean, you have only deferred that immediate moral responsibility off on someone else.
I know you say you don’t “enjoy” eating meat anymore…but you still do it (if I’m reading you correctly). Eating meat isn’t “necessary” to survival for humans, anymore. There are dozens if not hundreds of readily-available forms and brands of vegetable protein, either in the basic form of tofu or in flavored, colored, disguised forms such as gardenburgers or soymilk. If you are still eating meat instead of veg protein, you are as responsible for the death of those cows as the hunter is for the death of a deer or wapiti. The fact that you’re several steps removed and hunt your meat in a deli case instead of a forest isn’t morally relevant.