I still have the stomach to clean a fish, but I don’t think I could still clean, say, a bunny rabbit. I’m all for licensing and background checks for firearms, but leery of banning anything except guns with no purpose except to kill people. If I decided I want a gun for hunting, target shooting, or whatever I can deal with a waiting period. My dad, who’s hunted all his life and held shooting records, feels pretty much the same way. I kept my dog from killing a squirrel recently because I didn’t want her eating a possibly diseased rodent or have to deal with disposing of a dead squirrel in the city. If it had not been able to scamper up the tree less half of it’s tail, though, I would have let her finish it off. I still see that half tailed squirrel, but not in our yard.
My take is the gun aspect, shooting something living just doesn’t work with many people.
Depends on the fish, innit ? I’ll readily agree that nothing, and I mean nothing looks more placidly stupid than a carp, but larger fish like sharks seem pretty smart for example.
Octopuses are certainly smart as hell. Definitely smart enough to use tools and construct reasonings, capable of learning (some might even learn by watching on top of doing, which is an even higher form of reasoning) and long-term memories and possibly endowed with some measure of abstract thought and emotions - there’s some debate about this among biologists about that, which could explain some of their otherwise baffling behaviours. Like the “gardens” made famous by the Beatles, which is an actual thing some species of octopuses do for seemingly no reason besides “this rock should be here rather than there”.
Plus they look awesome.
You know who used to say things like that.
Are you arguing law and morality are the same thing? That’s a position I doubt you’d want to paint yourself into, so perhaps you should concede that the existence of a law says nothing about morality of the underlying conduct.
“The hell of it” is not the same as “for fun.” Why would it be morally wrong to do so to a human? Because humans are humans, we know humans are part of our ethical system and must be, because each of us individual knows that we are human, know exactly how we are in terms of being able to make ethical determinations, and from that we must conclude that other humans have intrinsic moral value. There is simply no similar situation for animals, so they are not afforded intrinsic moral value.
As I’ve said, “sentience” is a meaningless term and you’d be crazy to base moral decision making on it. Depending on where you draw the line on sentience it could include every living thing on earth, or could exclude even a portion of humans (children, mentally incapable persons etc.) Instead it makes much more sense to afford other humans ethical consideration, and makes no intrinsic sense to afford such consideration to non-human animals.
This makes little sense unless you think slaughterhouses are morally superior to hunting. If you believe animals are creatures deserving of ethical consideration (and I do not) I think it is far harder to defend factory raising and slaughtering of livestock than it is hunting free range animals in the wild for meat.
I never said only humans can experience suffering. However, suffering is a vague term, just like sentience. To conclude that the ability to suffer is what affords another entity moral consideration then you legitimately need to consider the case of amoeba, bacterium etc. They all react to stimuli in ways that could be considered suffering.
We’ve no evidence wolves can make ethical decisions. We know humans can. This is because we can communicate with humans and we ourselves are all humans, this allows us far more information on human decision making than lupine decision making. Lacking evidence, we certainly should not conclude a positive, that wolves are assumed to be capable of ethical decision making.
Just based on their behavior I’d argue wolves do not make decisions based on ethics and I think it’s quite obvious.
Every once in a while a thread here on the Dope comes along and illustrates to me how little I have in common with the majority of posters here. This thread would be laughably bizarre if it appeared in the local paper here. The entire premise of the OP, that hunting is not socially acceptable, fails outside of urban areas.
Hunting attitudes depend a great deal upon your location. Where I live even the teenage girls quit texting long enough to pick up their pink rifles and go hunting. And we auction off pink rifles each year in the high school gymnasium to benefit the scholarship foundation. They tend to be one of the hottest items offered.
To each his own, but your corner of the world or even of this country, does not represent the whole.
There’s little reason to believe cro-magnon society would have allowed for open murder without consequences. Challenges for supremacy over a tribe may have happened depending on the organization of the tribe, but almost certainly they would have had a proscribed way this happened. Human societies since as long as we’ve had record of them historically have no tolerated murders because it causes societal problems.
Plus, you’re talking about killing another human. That’s immoral. It was immoral when the Romans did it, immoral when Cro-Magnon man did it, immoral when some murderer did it yesterday in America. The act itself is immoral, and thus it is meaningless whether or not it is pleasurable as you can’t just commit immoral acts because they give you pleasure. But killing a wild animal (not property) cannot be an immoral act.
Sentience certainly has a few clear meanings conversationally or in a dictionary, but relating that meaning to animals is 100% subjective. There is no objective rule, and under any definitions of sentience I’ve ever heard it could include all living creatures or exclude almost all living creatures (including many humans.) It’s a nonsense term for making ethical decisions.
“The only thing”, that makes it entirely subjective.
I think it’s probably mildly unethical to let your passions take such hold of you that you throw something.
That’s because for some strange reason you believe animals have intrinsic moral value, when almost no argument you could cobble together could ever make that so. Like I said, sentience cannot be your argument, because sentience is a meaningless term in this context. Try to define sentience in a way that makes sense in terms of ethical decision making and I will easily poke a thousand holes in it.
They’re not synonymous, but the laws of a given society generally speaking are derived from the moral frameworks embraced by those societies. That and corruption.
You’re also dodging the question. Why, in your opinion, do we have animal cruelty laws if animals somehow exist outside of ethics ?
(this notion is loopy as hell to me, I’m not even fooling)
Of course it is. You can do it. You enjoy it. There’s no purpose to it outside of fun. Nobody’s going to throw you in jail for it. Therefore you do it - for the hell of it.
The Circular Department of Tautological Redundancy Studies Department called, they say they want their argument back and also their declarative rhetorical statement returned.
Also, it doesn’t follow that individuals must be able to make ethical determinations to be afforded moral value. Infants can’t determine shit, can you hunt them for sport ? How about the mentally challenged ? Therefore, the ability to make ethical determinations is immaterial wrt whether individuals are given “moral value”. Whatever the hell that might even mean.
Sentience might be. The ability to feel pain is not, and it’s not debatable that all mammals feel pain. If just looking at a hurt animal doesn’t do it for you, biology says they have the same nerves working the same way and informing a similar central mass of goop, triggering the exact same impulses and behaviours. That is not subjective.
And how would they not ? Humans are but monkeys (no ! I didn’t say butt monkeys !).
That was implicit, yes.
Industrial methods have their own slew of ethical problems. That is not in dispute.
But I don’t see much of an ethical issue with raising livestock and slaughtering them humanely, no. Well, admittedly there’s some, but much less of one than I see with purely recreational hunting or fishing.
10 out of the last 15 years I have gone on a deer hunt where I have one week to make a bow 2 arrows and a string and then kill a deer. I have yet to get a shot at a deer so I can safely say no deer are harmed when I hunt, I have to admit I actually prefer it that way.
I live in Ca. and hunting is not a welcome topic in a lot of circles. I avoid it alltogether. People raised in the city just see things differently I guess.
I agree. My Facebook feed is filled with pictures of fresh kill during certain times of the year and the most common posters are young women, especially the really hot ones. They will blast a Bambi faster than you can say Walt Disney.
I come from a family of hunters and from an area where it is the main tourist attraction. I never took to the sport personally because I always said that it combines the three things I hate most in the world into one nightmarish package (for me at least): waking up really really early, getting cold and sitting dead still for long periods of time. That isn’t my thing at all but I respect good hunters greatly. I love to shoot but hunting generally requires remarkably little of that and usually none at all, If you want to shoot, you are much better off just setting up some targets in a field and blast away because most hunts will end in one shot at the max and that is only if you have some luck.
Hunting is not only a perfectly reasonable activity, it is also a vital component of wildlife management and hunters are doing everyone a favor by engaging in their sport. Organizations like Ducks Unlimited have been at the forefront of conservation efforts for decades and have been very successful at both paying for wildlife conservation directly from their members and through lobbying efforts even when such concerns weren’t trendy.
The fact is that the most common knee-jerk emotional reaction you get in the U.S. is against deer hunters because everyone saw Bambi as a child. However, there are more deer today than there were when the Pilgrims landed and the numbers are increasing. That is not a good thing because deer overpopulation causes some serious problems including 200 deaths and 1.1 billion dollars a year through auto collisions alone. Combine that with health threats like Lyme disease and widespread crop destruction and suddenly Bambi doesn’t look so cute anymore. There are way too many deer in the Northeast and some other areas of the country today because there are not enough hunters.
We need more, not fewer hunters in many areas. Lawful hunters are always doing everyone a favor because the state game agencies set their quotas so that the yearly cull helps to keep a healthy population of all species and the fees paid by the hunters help pay for conservation efforts that benefit all species.
I’d like a cite that 40,000 years ago, anyone but your blood relatives would care or notice that you were ended by a competitor for your mate.
I also disagree with your assertions regarding the parameters of morality, and the narrow scope of your definition of same.
I’m pretty sure I made that abundantly clear in the OP that the objection to hunting is mostly a city thing.
You seem to think there is only one kind of hunting. That’s bizarre.
And there are more than one kind of anti-hunting personality. Some of the folks I know personally who are not well disposed toward hunting are pet owners (they don’t keep bloodhounds)n who associate their kitty or their chihuahua with the innocent forest creature that will be the victim of the hunt. I propose that there are many more people who have had pets the family loved very much (and grieved over, and even buried in the back yard) than individuals who kept a goldfish in a bowl (and flushed it when it died). Not every pet owner is against hunting, but the ones that are likely are more emotionally invested in their furry friend that they are in a scaly one.
Then there are the people who revere all life (leaving the unborn out of this debate) and have an aversion to firearms. Sure, they have a vague notion that some hunters use a compound bow, or a slingshot, or a blowgun, but I suggest the vast majority of anti-hunters think of a shotgun or rifle when they think of a hunter. If they hate firearms, a substantial percentage of that group may also decry hunting.
When I was young, I asked my Dad, who was raised on a farm, knew woodcraft and could track an animal through the forest, why he never went hunting with the local fellows. He certainly could shoot well, and had no aversion to slaughtering the farm animals. He said, “I don’t need to … we have cattle and chickens here, I don’t need to destroy the life of a free critter that’s living out in the woods. Let them have a nice life, at least.” So, there are also the people like that. We lived in a town of about population 40, half an hour from the “city”, (pop 16,000). He wasn’t a city slicker, just a farm boy with a particular kind of conscience.
To follow a little more, I do get what you are saying. Along those lines I’ll say that it’s really no different than activities like climbing a mountain even if it has a road going to the top, or whitewater rafting between destinations that can be reached by road. We still have physical bodies and haven’t descended into complete virtual reality yet. I love to make things with my hands that I could easily buy. Many people enjoy demonstrating their human capabilities at all levels. Hunting is no different, we kill millions of animals a day for food and many other purposes, a hunter performing the step of killing the animal for his own satisfaction or for necessity should not be socially unacceptable.
It is bizarre that is what you got out my post.
I have done lots of kinds of hunting personally ranging from deer hunting, ducks, raccoon, squirrels, doves and alligators. None of them were my thing but it wasn’t because I was against it morally. They all just take too much discipline for something I don’t care enough to put myself into extreme discomfort for and all of those require it.
I used deer hunters as an example because that is one that many people have a knee-jerk response against yet it is one of the most necessary types of hunting. The reason that deer are so overpopulated is that they are one of the species that thrive at the fringes of human society. They are both deadly to themselves if they become overpopulated because of heard starvation as well as humans. People created the deer overpopulation problem and now we have to manage it. You can either do that through government cull efforts or let people and organizations that care enough about all conservation to take care of it voluntarily and spend their own money to do it. I vote for the latter.
As for other types of hunting, some are completely necessary. My native state of Louisiana has both a nutria and feral hog problem. Both are invasive species that cause billions of dollars of damage a year. It is a fool’s game to think that you can make a significant dent in the current overpopulation but every hunter that kills even one is doing both people and the overall ecology of the area a favor.
If only fish could scream.
You made a lot of sweeping generalizations about hunting that don’t hold for any of my experiences. You said you don’t like hunting because you have to get up early, sit still in the cold, and only shoot once if you’re lucky. That’s what I got out of your post. It shouldn’t be surprising to you, since that’s what you actually typed.