Resolved: Hunting is immoral.

Well there is always a game theory problem with individual action being suboptimal in the collective. For the individual hunter, exceeding the bag limit doesn’t really do any harm to the population. But once everyone does…

It isn’t about taking what you need, either. The overwhelming majority don’t need to hunt at all, as I have never denied. But the overwhelming majority don’t need to eat ribeye from the supermarket either. Bag limits are more about responsibility to the environment.

I’m not talking about noble hunters, though I think hunters and fishermen tend to be some of the better environmentalists that I have come across. And just for interests sake, I am not a hunter. I have shot animals in the past when I lived on a farm, but that wasn’t hunting, and it is only a week ago I got my first gun in years. I do want to take it out to slaughter bambi sometime, but that is way in the future.

There are definitely irresponsible hunters out there, I agree. What I am not understanding is your insistance on their being a difference between Person A going out and killing an animal which he eats, and person B going to the supermarket and having someone else kill an animal, which he eats. Both are equally unnecessary. Your problem seems to be the one involves pleasure and the other doesn’t. I just cannot rationalize that distinction. Pleasure in the pain I would agree with you would be immoral. But enjoying the hunt doesn’t seem any different to me than enjoying cooking lobster.

I don’t like and would not take part in “canned hunts” though I have enjoyed the duck a friend brought home from one. But I don’t think you have any moral high ground over me when this weekend you remove the plastic wrap from a hunk of Bessie and put it in the oven, while I put a haunch of Bambi on the smoker.

And, I can’t believe no one has said it yet, but your user name is kinda perfect for this thread. :slight_smile:

Not at all, because I have not drawn a conclusion about you. I wrote this:
*Again, you **seem *to be drawing conclusions from data obtained from your ass.

The bolded word is not there by accident, nor was it included for rhetorical effect. It serves to admit that I do not, in fact, have enough data about you to judge how much actual experience with hunters, because you have not discussed such in this thread, or at least I haven’t seen it. If you have talked about what actual experiences and research underpin your data, please point me to the post number so that I can read it.

Because we want to eat the animal, obviously. It is difficult to eat an animal that has been shot only with a camera. I suppose I could make jokes about being an Evil Overlord at it till it committed suicide, but that would be evil more cruel.

As opposed to doing things we don’t like…well, take me. I hate exercising. Seriously. Getting my ass on the treadmill or jogging track is very hard for me. I still do it, though, because I like the way I feel afterwards, and because it is good for my health. In otherwords, I engage in a distasteful activity for an an extended period for an eventual payoff. Hunting is almost the reverse: I engage in a pleasant activity for an extended period, though it includes a brief and extremely unpleasant interval.

You seem to have missed this before, so I will ask it again: Please explain to me why the deer is more morally significant than the cattle, swine, or sheep in slaughterhouses.

Simple logic underpins it. Logic which you have yet to refute.

As noted above there are more than 1,000 hunting ranches in the US alone. People pay a lot of money for their guns and ammo and hunting licenses and (maybe) taxidermy and butchering and effort to get to wherever it is they hunt. Granted not all (or even most probably) people pay for a hunting ranch but nevertheless there is effort and money and time put into the pursuit of hunting.

You are suggesting all these people do this because they do not like shooting the animal? That beggars belief. Particularly if you include the hunting ranches which seem to be rather expensive. People spending gobs of money to do something they dislike…makes loads of sense. :rolleyes:

Necessity.

If you are hunting because it is the only means to feed you and your family fine. Have at it. Deer, cow, duck…whatever. I can understand not taking pleasure in the killing but it is necessary.

If you are hunting because you’d rather personally kill your meal then you are deriving pleasure from the hunting/killing. Hard to see it any other way as it makes no sense for you to spend the time, money and effort to hunt if you actually hate shooting what you are hunting. Perhaps it is your least favorite part but apparently you are enjoying the experience overall and find it a valuable use of your time. If not you would do something else you find a more profitable use of your time.

You keep harping on this like it has some meaning or value apart from what you are attempting to attach to it.

You know, I think I’ll drop the rope at this point.

Yes because the pro-hunting crowd likes to rationalize away the implications of their actions. They are all really environmentalists serving to make the animal population more healthy and honoring the memory of our ancestors in a time honored tradition!

As I said context counts. I have shown where there are cases where the same thing, on the face of it, are ok and others where that thing is not ok. That is entirely based on the context in which it happens. Killing an intruder to your home is not deemed immoral. Killing a random dude on the streets is. You seem to simply want to equivocate and say, “Hey, killing is killing so what difference how or why it is done? How dare you draw a moral judgment based on that!” In reality we make these distinctions daily and understand why we do so.

From my first post to this thread:

Point out the rationalization, please. In fact, it’d be tres kewel if you’d point out anywhere in this thread where I rationalized any aspect of hunting.

I said, “the pro-hunting crowd likes to rationalize away the implications of their actions.”

That does not mean all of them are dishonest about why they like to hunt. The proof that some like to make these rationalizations are to be found in numerous posts in this thread.

ETA: And admitting to enjoying the killing, while refreshingly honest, does not change the calculus. Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that is where the money is. Refreshingly honest and to the point…he’s still a bank robber though.

Ah, I see.

I’m done with this, too.

Initial reply from original post:

I don’t think it is immoral to kill animals in order to eat them. I do think some immoral things are done some of the time with regards to RAISING animals AS food sources: how they are kept, the treatments to which they are exposed, etc; to that end, hunting is often the most humane form of predatory human behavior.

If it is not OK to kill animals but it is OK to kill plants in order to eat them, the difference between the two has to be defensible, it has to exist for a reason. In your ethical framework, is it because animals are conscious and plants are not? Is it because animals feel pain and plants do not? Or some other reason?

I do not think that killing someone (or something conscious) is by any means the worst thing that one can do to a conscious organism. Coercion, humiliation, torture, and other things can be profoundly more cruel than killing. Especially if the killing strategy is respectful and designed to take place rapidly with a minimum of inflicted pain.

Everyone and everything dies. Dying as a consequence of predation is no worse IMO than dying from being struck by a car or falling from a height, and as deaths go is probably a better way to die than many disease processes.

Unlike some nasty animal-related human behaviors such as bear-baiting, the human act of killing an animal in order to eat it is not one that distinguishes us from the vast majority of other species. If we are acting immorally when we kill animals in order to eat them, then are other carnivores such as tigers and coyotes and polar bears also immoral? If not why not? If so what then? If it is cruel only when WE do it, is it because the tiger is not conscious of the meaning of what it does? If so, how does the tiger’s lack of consciousness differ from the antelope’s consciousness of being attacked and preyed upon, assuming that it is the prey animal’s consciousness that makes it wrong to kill the prey animal but not the potato plant?

Do you accept that it is not a simply binary question of right and wrong and that tossing out the proposition “hunting is immoral” is far from adequate or self-explanatory?

OK now to read the rest of the thread & see how the conversation has progressed.

Next I’ll be hearing that it is completely natural for animals to die from a projectile hitting them, and preferable to being eaten by a predator.

OK, having read through the thread…

I don’t see anything intrinsically morally wrong with killing humans for food; it’s just not tenable for social stability.

I think it is wrong to corral a bunch of creatures and have folks pay to come in and shoot them at close range while they are tied up. I think it is wrong to kill animals just to get trophies or to be able to say “I killed a ___”. I have less problem with killing for leather, horn, hair, fur, etc although I’m critical of how animals that are raised for such are kept and treated.

I think it is wrong to kill something you do not intend to eat or otherwise make use of, to kill just for the sake of killing it. I think “because it is a pest animal that carries diseases and eats our food” is a reasonable justification though.

I do not assume animals do not feel pain and/or do not suffer. Heck, of course they do. One should kill quickly using methods that inflict as little pain as possible.

I am pretty carnivorous, but I wish this would stop coming up in defense of meat eating. Look, the steak on your plate killed more plants to create than an equivalent amount of calories from eating plants directly. Even if you prove that killing a plant is as immoral as killing an animal, vegetarianism is still more moral than an omnivorous diet, due to the fact that vegetarians kill less plants than omnivores.

edit: Actually, that kind of is relevant in defending hunting, as you can’t really be blamed for the wild animal’s plant consumption, while I do think the eater is responsible for any plants consumed by the animal that was raised to be eaten.

Us wacky Europeans come out with all sorts of rubbish, eh?

I made the decision last week to prepare myself to try hunting for the first time (as a shooter) next year.

I am looking forward to meeting some new folks. I am looking forward to honing some shooting skills I have let lie dormant for far too long. I am excited about the idea of tracking an animal (that isn’t a human playing Airsoft).

I am hoping like hell that my skills haven’t deteriorated to the point where I wound an animal and he gets away.

I am doing this to save money (in the long run. Next year will probably be a loss, taking the cost of the rifle into account). I can live just fine buying meat from the local store, but want to save money, and I enjoy venison.

Am I a sadist? I don’t think so.

That is an optional perspective that I did not think of. Yes, if that is the rationale used by the OP, I think that’s actually a fairly reasonable grounds for opposing carnivorous behavior in humans, whether in the form of “that’s an inefficient use of our finite amount of land and resources” or in the more ethical format “you kill MORE life forms when you prey on animals than when you consume plants”.

My question(s) would then be “So is it immoral to kill any life form if killing can be avoided?” and/or “So is it immoral to be less efficient in our use of resources?”

We actuall save money from hunting food wise in the long run over the year, I dont know if you realize that. I enjoy hunting, there was one time where I wounded a deer, I’ll be honest i didn’t like that, but I quickly put it out of its misery. But I can guarantee you a wild deer has a better life than any farm raised, destined for slaughter pig out there. Pigs are intellengent animals, when the slaughtering starts they know it and go into a panic and you prefer this method ?

I’d rather have bambi running around the wild most of its life, and I show up one day stalk and shoot it.

Frankly, what people do on their own time is none of your business if its legal, hunting is one of those legal activities. If everyone had to go out and kill and dress their own food, you’d probably have alot more vegans out there. So your disdain and attempt to persuade hunters to cease their “barbaric” activities will be fruitless because we’ve done the dirty work, we know what it entails, etc.

You should go after meat eaters, who dont kill & dress their own meals instead you might have more success.

So righteous.

I never said you cannot go hunting. In my view taking pleasure in killing is messed up. The issues with the factory raised meat industry need addressing but it does not change that observation.

And FTR I eat meat. Had BBQ ribs tonight in fact. They were yummy. And in case you missed it I have been through a slaughterhouse. I am not unaware of where my ribs tonight came from (the smell of that place…something I will never forget).

Can we have a refrence for this claim please?

Because I can’t see how the production of a steak results in the death of even a single plant. Grazed grasses have evolved to deal with that pressure and don’t die when a cow bites the top off them. Grains fed to cattle are all annuals and are harvested after they have finished their natural lifecycle, so no plant are killed for the production there either.

So can you please provide a reference fr this extraordinary claim that more plants die to produce a steak than to produce the same number of calories from the plants themselves? Because the fact is that most of the mass of a steak comes from grasses, and humans can’t get any calories at all out of grass except by digging them up and eating the root system, which does indeed kill them.

And if you can’t manage a reference for that claim how about an easier reference that even a single plant is killed to create a steak.

Ultimately when I look at the killing of an animal by a human being I’m looking at a single act which results in no harm to another person, so I do not see how it is a significant moral issue.

I can see certain situations in which it could become a moral issue. If a human kills an animal that is the rightful property of another human, that is immoral.

If a human gets pleasure from the kill, or from the eating, and since no person is harmed, I can’t see how it is immoral. I won’t go as far as to say it is moral, but it isn’t immoral.

To open up ancillary arguments like:

-Hunting sometimes kills innocent bystanders
-Killing animals can lead to extinctions
-Raising animals for slaughter is a bad use of land

I will first say that none of those have to do with the singular act of killing an animal.

However, examining them on their merits:

  1. Lots of things have occasion to kill other people accidentally. I look at the intended act not the outcome to determine its morality.

  2. By and large animals hunted as game in first world countries are amongst the least likely animals on the planet to become extinct. Domestic animals are essentially guaranteed to not go extinct as long as we maintain herds of them.

In the past and in the third world humans have engaged in destructive hunting that has caused horrifying results on the natural balance of things. However that is neither here nor there.

  1. Generally speaking livestock are raised by private concerns on private property, I don’t see a compelling reason to interfere with this based on land use arguments especially in light of the fact most large scale farming causes pollution and because large scale farming is essential for the survival of humans as a species.

I will also add, something aside from the moral issue is the logistical issue. In parts of America it’s no big thing to have a huge selection of vegetarian and vegan products, probably dozens of different stores and restaurants catering to your needs. In a huge portion of the world you do not have access to these resources and the personal financial situation of most of the world’s population means they can only realistically find what is sold at their very local markets and what they can scavenge or raise themselves. For these people it is a crapshoot as to whether or not they have the local resources necessary in order to get a proper diet exclusively from non-meat sources.