It’s nice and warm and sunny all year round. You build a nice grass hut in the middle of a forest for living. For food, you only use your body as weapon to kill an animal for meat. Meat has become a stable diet for you, and you eat whatever is available. Sometimes you travel whenever and wherever your prey travel. Now, one day you meet a random person from the city, and this person becomes horrified at the way you live your life. This person comments that your way of life is “unethical”, because you kill meat so cruelly. Yet, this person buys meat at the local supermarket, which have been factory-farmed and harvested. In this situation, which way of eating meat is unethical? Yours? The other person’s? Both? Neither?
At the very least the city-slicker is kind of rude for walking into my grass hut without knocking on my shrunken head wind chimes to announce his presence. But I’ll give him credit for coming all this way just to lecture me on lemur meat. Does he speak Equatorial?
IOW, how can you pose any kind of meaningful question of ethics with such a highly contrived hypothetical?
Lotsa good meat on a city slicker. Just sayin’
It’s not supposed to be meaningful. I just had this random thought popped into my brain. 
The equatorial is part of a natural predator/prey cycle, IMO.
The city slicker supports altering the natural landscape and environments to support the factory farmed animals and their food sources. (and ftm, the fact he lives in a city anyways)
I consider factory farms questionable and unethical, besides the hypotheticals in the OP. Small farms, in general, tend to take better care of their animals, in my observation.
In that case, the city-slicker definitely is unethically freaking out my family, by interrupting our dinner. We’re going to throw him into the river so he can instead lecture the piranhas about meat ethics, as they nibble away at him.
Hmmm… interesting. Now this may be a crazy idea, but have any of you ever considered the possibility of living like a caveman in a cave and kill animals for meat because you need them to survive? How would you feel if a bunch of civilized humans have bulldozed away your forest and flattened the landscape, so you have no cave and no home?
All them chemicals he’s eating and breathing? I’ll stick with the lemurs, thanks.
Clearly you haven’t lived in the tropics. 
This wouldn’t necessarily make you unethical, but it would make me question your intelligence. Animal-killing tools are pretty easy to make and would make your hunting a lot more efficient and less messy. Possibly less cruel as well.
Depends how you are killing the animals. Snapping their necks is probably not cruel.
As with most things in life, “it depends.” There is not enough information to judge, so I’ll go with “neither,” unless we know more about the actual situations.
I’ll cavil, just very slightly, and say that if the equatorial can make fire and work tools, even stone tools, he has transcended the strictest definition of the word “natural.”
(The word has to be interpreted on a spectrum. If you say, “Humans are part of nature, and thus so are their creations,” then plutonium bombs and supercomputers are “natural.” I’d prefer not to interpret the word that liberally!)
Agreed. Alas, some small-farm techniques – such as slash-and-burn agriculture – are also questionable, because of the destruction of natural habitat, and because the practice is not sustainable. Recently slashed-and-burned land is good for raising crops, but it quickly loses much of its fertility, leading the farmers to move on and to slash another section of forest. It becomes less like farming, and a little more like mining!
So, sustainability, too, is a spectrum, and, alas, modern large-scale agriculture, for various reasons (salinity of soil, erosion, etc.) is less sustainable than the “primitive” equatorial dude.
How about “hot and humid”?
Isn’t that what the STRAIGHT DOPE is for? 
What does living on the equator have to do with your hypothetical ethics question?
I DO live on the equator (well, very close … in Jakarta) so I opened this thread in high hopes of contributing something special. I’m crestfallen.
Hunter gatherer environmental management is what caused the vast majority of species extinctions that we can attribute to the human species. So the Equatorial dude is far less sustainable than modern large-scale agriculture.
People have some weird idea that “primitive” = “natural” = “sustainable” when of course the three terms are utterly unrelated.
Ya got me there… I actually did think that primitive and natural were equivalent to sustainable, simply by dint of lower immediate impact. I didn’t think about the extinction of the New World megafauna.
We’re prolific little bunny rabbits, ain’t we?
I’m trying to think of what animals I could reliably catch only using my body as a weapon. Grubs and insects, small crippled birds, maybe a few slow moving reptiles, and a bunch of left-over carrion from other animals’ kills. Humans are not well equipped for regular death matches with other feral creatures that have teeth or claws. I think I’d be dead in relatively short order, from a scratch or bite infection of nothing else, if I tried to take on anything much bigger than a mouse (a very small one) without any weapon at all.
Yeah, I used to live in Aceh, Indonesia near the equator, I thought this thread was going to be about dengue fever, or the rainy season (so much rain), or eating at the Chili’s in the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
Yea I live near the equator too, where may I find my grass hut and animals to hunt? Unless you mean city pidgeons and rats, or stray dogs :eek:
I recently read an article about present day hunters who run their prey literally to death. There is solid evidence that humans can hunt decent size game using nothing but their bodies.
David Fleming: Looking back at the history of man and our ability to outrun animals over long distances - ESPN
I’ve also heard stories about Indian (feather, not circle) tribes that used to run down their deer and other swift moving prey.
If the OP is asking if hunting is more or less ethical than buying factory produced meat, then you don’t have to go to the equator. My sister and I have this argument, she thinks hunting is cruel, but eats meat. I’ve pointed out that she prefers her meat wrapped in plastic and if I was an animal that had to be eaten, I would rather be a deer running around in the woods until the day I am hunted, than one a those beasts living out my life in a feed lot hellscape. It’s not even close in my mind. I don’t hunt, but I do try to buy ethically raised and slaughtered meat.
I can get not eating meat because one thinks it is unethical, but I don’t get eating meat, but disapproving of hunting. It seems like it is just a matter of not wanting to see or hear about the unpleasantness.
Now back to eating on the equator, rather than using my body as a weapon, I prefer the Makan Sutra food court in Singapore and man do I love me some kaya toast in the morning.
I am aware that humans can run down and catch up to most animals in a long chase. I am talking about killing them, not chasing them. Without weapons, your only choice is to engage in some kind of wrestling match – maybe to strangle them, or to break their necks (if you’re strong enough), or to… bite them to death.
Now, if I had a spear, or a bow and arrow, or even a decent sized rock, it would be a different story.