Alright, I’ll bite. A long time ago, we used to set up a white back stop behind things that attract flies. Things like dop poop, a banana, a piece of hamburger. My buddy and I would spend hours sniping the flies off the bait, with the goal to only hit the fly, not the poop. My buddy used an FWB 300 10M rifle, and I used a single stroke pneumatic Daisy 953 or 853 if I remember correctly.
Flies are animals and we whacked hundreds of them for the pure pleasure of it. Morality never entered into our conversations. I will note that insects were the only target. Does that make it less repulsive, killing for fun if they are abundant insects rather than cute fuzzy critters?
If they’re eating your crops or causing other problems for your land or buildings, then I don’t have a problem with them being humanely killed. If you’re just a sadist who enjoys killing things, then I have a problem.
I don’t have a problem with that either. Whether your motivation for killing vermin is protecting your property or achieving an erection, as long as the vermin have to be killed anyway it makes no difference to me.
And that I think is where the overlap is that makes the issue muddy.
I have no doubt that there are people out there that enjoy shooting animals, but every one I personally know that is like that only shoots them as part of land management or hunting for meat (in the case of deer). I think everyone, shooters and non shooters alike, have nothing but disdain for those who would go out and shoot random animals (or things) while leaving the carcass to rot.
I know some good old boys that love just killing stuff for the fun of it. Squirels arent too bad because you’d be hard pressed to kill too many of em around here. They kill snakes too, out in the wild for the hell of it. Thats a little more troublesome because snakes do little harm and much good out in the wild. They would also have no trouble killing a big old turtle thats probably decades old for the fun of it either. I know because we’ve had to stop em from doing it. They behave when they are with us, but on their own they pretty much kill anything they can when out there and consider it a good day in the woods.
I have shot pest animals for fun, and will do it again given the opportunity. I see no problem with it, if you subscribe to r/k selection theory most pest animals are r-selection and reproduce quickly to fill the limits of their environment and after the carrying capacity of their environment is reached there is high mortality within the group. This is an evolutionary design to support survival of the species. By killing individual animals within the group you are not changing the carrying capacity of the area. So basically you are exchanging one adult life for the life of a future generation.
