Then based on this line of reasoning, it is moral to hunt when you eat what you kill, because it maximizes utility.
Most people enjoy eating meat. Some people like to hunt. Those who eat what they kill have the enjoyment of eating meat and the enjoyment of the hunt. Therefore hunters are getting more enjoyment than those who eat what someone else kills. If there was no hunting, the total amount of enjoyment (if there is such a thing) would go down.
I think you would agree that hunting for population control is necessary. Therefore, the situation that maximizes enjoyment is to have those who like to hunt, and who eat what they kill, do the population control, thus maximizing enjoyment. And by and large that is what is happening now. As Martin Hyde says, there is a strong social pressure among hunters to kill as humanely as possible, not to waste the meat, and to look down on and ostracize those who do either.
So when a hunter says “I eat what I kill” he or she is expressing solidarity with a system under which a number of desirable outcomes are being produced. Hunters get to hunt, meat eaters get to eat meat, and the excessive population of prey animals like white-tail deer is reduced. Even the deer “benefit” in a way - getting shot is better than starving to death, and culling the herd tends towards stable populations instead of the boom-crash of Malthusian starvation.
Yeah, I don’t know where the “shitty meat” thing came from. I suppose you could kill a sick animal or something where the meat would be bad, but venison in general is nice, lean and lovely. And better to give it to a shelter (assuming they want it) than to waste it.
Bison doesn’t really do it for me, though - I prefer cow.
[QUOTE=Learjeff]
Certainly not by an arbitrary standard such as “natural”! Rape is natural. It’s natural among male apes to kill the offspring of a new mate (from her previous mate). Lots of heinous things are natural, since nature is merely the result of evolution and is no guarantee of morality.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, me either, if you actually go back and read what I wrote. I DON’T think it’s moral because it’s ‘natural’ because I don’t think morality comes into play at all on this issue. Obviously, wrt rape it DOES come into play because, pretty universally, rape is considered an unsanctioned action by society with the imprint of being wrong, evil or ‘immoral’. Same with killing the children of someone you marry because they weren’t yours. That’s ‘immoral’ because society doesn’t sanction such actions and pretty universally sees them as wrong, evil, etc etc. Meat eating isn’t close to either of those, nor is there a really large movement to make it so. It’s really a fringe group of people who believe that it’s ‘immoral’ to eat animals, and to me it’s on par with people who believe they shouldn’t eat pork, or only eat animals killed in a certain way, or not eat meat on Fridays, or the myriad other weird dietary actions or limitations people self impose for various reasons on themselves.
Certainly. And we each have to decide some things for ourselves and where our individual moral compasses point…again, as I said earlier. However, we don’t get to decide our societies moral compass simply because we don’t like something. We can CHOOSE to act on that inner moral compass ourselves (because we live in a time and a place where such a choice can be made purely and solely based on our individual morality, and not on survival), and if you want to make that individual choice for yourself not to eat meat then go for it! Knock yourself out and all that. I’ll make my own, and to ME it’s not a moral or immoral choice, but simply a dietary quirk.
Oh man…bison cheese burgers seriously rock. It’s a lot better, IMHO, than cow hamburger, but I concede MMV. I agree with the others…venison is pretty good. My WAG is the guy who wrote that has never had any, and just assumes that deer meat suck since, if it were good you’d be able to get it at Safeway, as the gods intended.
Robert163 it sounds very much like you have a problem with the relative exchange of value in this situation. The premise rests on attributing value to the hunted animal’s life. If you work from the assumption that animal life has no intrinsic value then there’s no question here. The satisfaction acquired by the hunter is always a non-zero value and so acceptable.
But back to where I think you’re coming from.
Hunt to eat - the intrinsic value of the animal’s life (A[sub]L[/sub]) exchanged for physical sustenance (P[sub]S[/sub])
Hunt to kill - the intrinsic value of the animal’s life (A[sub]L[/sub]) exchanged for emotional satisfaction (E[sub]S[/sub])
Hunt to control population - the intrinsic value of the animal’s life (A[sub]L[/sub]) exchanged for a more sustainable ecosystem (E)
It seems that in your case both E[sub]S[/sub] < P[sub]S[/sub] < A[sub]L[/sub] < E
The only problem you really have is justifying the superiority of sustenance over emotion enjoyment but lots of people would argue that a physical necessity counts as a higher value than a good acquired solely for personal pleasure.
Well… an older buck can be more tough and gamey than a younger or female animal, and if it’s not cooked properly… yeah, that can be less than wonderful.
Which is a reason why those who hunt for food purposes do like to get ahold of a doe license. (Technically, “non-antlered deer” license - some bucks don’t have antlers, usually due to young age but I suppose there could be other reasons). And someone with a does license is definitely not going for the traditional deer trophy of antlers.
You aren’t strictly applying the same methodology. I wouldn’t eliminate all deer to try and eliminate all the problems associated with them. They are a key part of their habitats. The problem with deer has a lot to do with overpopulation creating or worsening the issues.
In many places in the Eastern US, it’s believed that the whitetail population is greater than before white guys showed up in North America with guns. The problem is those white guys with guns killed most of their major predators (wolves being the main one.) Most of the existent predators are limited to preying on fawns and can’t or don’t often prey on full size, relatively healthy adults. Humans removed the normal controls on their population. To top it off we converted land to agriculture. We cleared out stuff they didn’t eat and replaced it with dense fields of tasty, edible stuff. With predation severely limited and food availability up, overpopulation is not surprising. Hunting is one control for the problem we caused in the first place. That’s different than just blasting anything that is associated with a negative impact on humans.
My dad and brother used to go deer hunting every winter. My dad just did rifle season but my brother did bow and black powder hunting as well. Personally I always found it a lot more acceptable to know that the animal had a chance at escape vs the hunter.
A lot of people think it is very easy to hunt a deer, but in reality it sometimes takes years for a hunter to gain the skill necessary to get one. Deer are very good at being prey animals. They are pretty cunning and will go running at the slightest sound or perception of danger. Wouldn’t you rather know that the meat your eating had a chance at life?
The big game hunters, like the one most recently in the news, are absolutely not equivalent with most hunters in the US. Most hunters in the US do not ‘bait’ the prey and trap it before making a no-skill close range shot at a barely moving animal. The deer people hunt are adults who have had a chance to raise fawns and be wild deer.
I keep talking a lot about deer, and I haven’t seen deer meat in grocery stores. But honestly the thought of a bunch of animals raised in artificial captivity and mind-numbing conditions only to be orderly marched and executed by an electric stun with 0 chance of survival or escape… that is a lot more appalling than someone dedicating years to being capable of killing a wild animal with respect - which most do.
I have - granted, it was a pretty upscale grocery store. They offered several varieties of game meat, all of it considerably more expensive than domestic cattle and not always available (obviously, hunters are not always successful).
If everyone had to pay those prices for meat there’d be a lot less over-consumption of animal flesh in the US.
Ok, this is going back in the thread a bit. But I can almost see it as more moral to hunt than to shop. Hunters know that they are taking life and do not apologize for it or ask for someone to do it for them. Shoppers get to pretend that meat isn’t an animal that was raised and slaughtered in a shop reeking of the carcasses and blood of its fellow animals. I would also guess that deer killed in hunting live a happier, freer life than either feed lot cattle (which is awful to see), or free range cattle (which are just in a larger pen and not really living the way they would in a human-free environment).
So your steak can either come from an animal that lived completely free eating whatever it wanted and doing whatever it wanted for a while or not. Given that you’re still having steak for dinner, which is more moral?
And to be balanced, the eat-what-you-kill thing is a bit overdone. All it says is you’re not wasteful in your hobbies. The percentage of hunters who have to kill to put protein on the table (so poor they can’t afford meat, but can afford to hunt) is almost certainly tiny.
Also, I’m guessing rod & reel fishermen should be included here as well, cause it’s basically the same thing as hunting.
I live in Pennsylvania where they close down schools for the opening of deer hunting season. I have yet in my life to see venison in any restaurant or any grocery store. I’ve had venison jerky once which was dreadful. So if hardly anyone in the deer hunting capital of the world won’t eat it, why pat yourself on the back dumping this crap on the homeless?
First of all, I’m a registered Republican though in GE I vote Democrat most of the time.
I’d rather drop off a corn cob for a homeless person to eat than deer meat. I see corn on he menu all the time. I see it at grocery stores. Never have I seen venison. Price aside, because I’ve been to $100 a plate restaurants and haven’t seen it there either.
In our area, it’s not considered a normal food. So why humiliate homeless people by making them eat it?
BTW I’m not anti-hunter. Deer hunting is important for population control. It’s just the same “i donate deer meat to the homeless shelter!” braggarts are the same ones who think we should completely eliminate welfare. “Get a job---- until then you are lucky us hunters are out there to feed you deer meat barbecue, you lazy bums!”. You like deer meat? You want to donate dried up beef jerky for the homeless to live on? Knock yourself out. I just don’t want to hear about it.
