Simply restating it is not establishing it. Humans are carnivores. They eat meat to survive. Of course, people eat for pleasure as well, but there is no de facto argument that meat eating **must **be for pleasure.
I thought that we were omnivores. I’m not saying that meat consumption as a whole is for solely pleasure purposes, but most in the US eat a hell of a lot of it because it’s tastes good, not for the necessary protein portion of our diet.
I was under the impression that the amount of space devoted to crops to feed the animals we eat is greater than what would be needed to feed us the plant material directly. In other words there is a great deal of loss of efficiency at each step in the food chain.
Carnivores are meat eaters. We eat meat. It doesn’t mean we can’t be omnivores as well.
What “most” people do “a hell of a lot of” still does not establish that eating meat necessarily means eating for pleasure, and it most certainly does not establish, per the OP, that eating meat equals killing for fun. The idea is absurd.
Omnivores eat both. Carnivores just meat. Classifying all meat consumption as being solely for nutritional necessity is absurd, at least here in the US. We eat a lot of it because it tastes good, because we want to, ie; pleasure. It had to be killed to get to our plates. Your denial of all this is rather silly.
Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill?
My opinion: If you kill animals for fun, and it’s the actual killing that’s fun, something ain’t right with you, psychologically or morally. You’re in a different category from meat-eaters and from the many hunters for whom the appeal in hunting is something other than making animals die.
I took “killing animals for fun” in a broad sense, meaning any recreational hunting.
Your links for the African Forest and Asian elephants both lead only to the African Forest elephant. But thank you for pointing out they are endangered. Here in Thailand, we’ve gone from more than 100,000 working elephants in 1900 to less than 3000 wild and less than 2300 domesticated ones today, and numbers for both are still dwindling. (We have more wild elephants than India but fewer than Burma.)
Every time I’m in Cambodia, I’m forever being asked if I want to shoot a cow with an AK-47. Apparently, that’s quite a lucrative sideline for certain entrepreneurs.
Oh, thanks.
Here you go:
(My post is my cite, as a I believe a famous philosopher once said. 
)
Is it true that the domesticated Asian elephants are essentially all captured from the wild rather than being raised in captivity?
No, that is not at all true. There are many baby elephants around born to domesticated elephants. Cute little buggers, too. And have you ever seen a pregnant elephant? That’s quite a sight. The gestation period is something like 22 months, and I saw one walking down the street one day that must have been 21 1/2 months gone. That or she had swallowed a van, dunno.
Sad when I see them wandering the streets of Bangkok. Ever since logging became outlawed in Thailand (even though it’s still practiced illegally), mahouts (elephant keepers) have been at a loss what to do with their elephants. Too many end up in Bangkok, wandering the streets, mainly near tourist areas, selling bananas at 20 baht (about 60 US cents now) a bag to feed their elephants. Some sell cucumbers, and THOSE mahouts should be ashamed of themselves, because they are just going for a quick profit and care almost nothing about the elephant itself. It’s illegal to bring elephants into Bangkok, and police do periodically conduct a sweep and kick them all out, but they always end up back in the city. One time years ago, some official came up with the bright idea of implanting chips under the skin of any elephant caught in the city, so they could track it. What, you need a microchip to follow an elephant through Bangkok??? After some mirth, the idea thankfully died a quiet death.
But when I see these elephants in the city, I refuse to buy their food to feed them. I will in no way encourage them to bring the poor beasts here. Bangkok is a horrible environment for them, simply horrible. The government needs to do more to help the out-of-work elephants and their mahouts. There’s been some initiatives to use them in the tourism industry, in particular elephant “roundups” like the annual one in Surin Province, which are just tourist shows by domesticated elephants. This is why Thailand’s annual elephant-polo tournament is so good; it gives them something to do and a lot of exposure and has become a big event. I’ve played elephant polo, and these are magnificent beasts, incredibly intelligent.
Sorry for the hijack, but the topic of elephants is a passionate one with me. To get back on track with hunting, even though hunting elephants is illegal in Thailand, certain wealthy Thai businessmen have the money to indulge in the “sport.” They are rarely if ever prosecuted. Makes my blood boil.
Sorry, one more slight hijack, since you mentioned baby elephants. One time, the wife and I were on holiday in Kanchanaburi Province, site of the Bridge over the River Kwai. By the bridge was a mahout with a mother elephant and her baby. I can’t remember the mother’s name, but the baby was named Joey. We took the elephant out riding, along with the mahout, and Joey followed along. He was like a puppy out for a walk and kept scampering into farmers’ fields, which I’m sure the farmers didn’t appreciate, but the mahout kept chasing him back out. When we returned to the bridge, the mahout took mother and child into the river for a bath, and you’ve never seen a happier baby elephant than Joey. He kept diving under the water and splashing back up.
Sadly, a couple of years later, we read in the newspaper that the mother was hit by a train and killed on the tracks that go over the bridge. Dragged half a mile apparently before the train came to a stop. 
Is it any better, morally, if they’re just “small varmints”? http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Apr06/0,4670,RomneyHunting,00.html
I disagree with the premise. By eating meat, i’m not directly causing an animal to be killed; if I don’t buy that steak, it doesn’t bring it back to life. Likewise, the loss of a single customer is likely not enough to mean that store cuts back on its order by one. No more animals will die as a result of me, solely, eating meat. OTOH, one animal less will die if I don’t kill it. They may be close to each other morally, but I disagree they’re the same thing.
I was visiting a family that has been a friend of my family for generations, and got invited out on a hunting trip. How much more detail could you want?
Perhaps not, but there is no reason for us in the West to eat meat other than for pleasure. If meat were made illegal, our survival would not be threatened; indeed we could probably support a lot more of us!
There’s probably something psychologically different about most people that derivive the pleasure exclusively from the killing, but I don’t see it as a moral difference nor a sign of disease.
I was rather hoping to take up wrestling grizzly Bears for fun and profit ,but then somebody pointed out that it constituted cruelty to animals so very reluctantly I dropped the idea .
Im still very pissed off about it.
That analogy would break down with a Poussin, say.
More fundamentally it violates the laws of supply and demand, because they are predicated on continuous variables, whilst number of animals killed is naturally a discrete variable. But over time, and with lots of consumers, it becomes essentially continuous.
You were invited, you were not obliged to kill.
Incidentally, this family of yours that has been friends of your family for generations, were they aware of what they were doing.
You could have refused to go or even politely declined the invite, or was that not an option? :dubious: .
As I’ve said in another thread, stop with the twaddle pal, I’ve been around longer than you :o
Please, please, oh God please, tell me you won’t be ponying up to become a memeber
You still seem to be under the bizarre impression that I’m trying to atone for, or mitigate, what I did by pleading ignorance.