Brigliadore wrote:
You seem to have a problem with only reading, or possibly only retaining, the parts of other people's posts that it suits your argument to cite.

To explain it still a different way, yes, judged in the matter of having helped, in some small way, to perpetuate an industry that causes the deaths of millions of completely innocent animals, I am, by my meat-eaing ways, guilty, and I believe that I already labeled myself a probable hypocrite before you did.

Practically speaking, there is absolutely zero chance that all the forces of PETA and friends are ever going to eliminate the meat industry - but I believe that its possible to put a dent in the killing of wild creatures for fun and 'sport' by highlighting the pathological nature of the activity.

Killing animals in order to feed your family or to make a living is one thing - doing it for fun is just sick and wrong.

Quote:

Besides, wolves rarely kill healthy sheep -- they usually only go after the sick ones, which the farmer gets rid of, anyways. There was a much simpler problem to the wolf/coyote issue: lithium. Lace a carcass with lithium and let 'em eat up. The illness that follows is so severe that it only takes that one meal for them to associate being violently sick with eating mutton.

I do hunt coyotes for sport. They are smaller than wolves and even the coyotes will pack up and go after healthy calves. Sure they will take the sick ones first if any are available, but they are not picky at all. Any rancher around here will give you access to hunt all the coyotes you want. They get around the increased deer populations buy charging people to hunt those animals.

You would rather a deer starve and feed the coyotes than be hunted and feed humans?

Yes -- this makes much more sense to me than hunters removing a part of the food chain and interrupting the natural process.

...however, with the hunting of predators that has already taken place (along with general reduction due to development), there aren't enough to properly control the populations.

We are doing our duty in the food chain. I should have been more clear.

Maybe. I still don't buy the whole "genetic limitation in a population through the dominance of a SuperDeer" idea.

The hawks, snakes, cats, and my silly dog for that matter will help control the mice population as usual.

Hmm. Mice was a bad example.

There are plenty of animals out there that are not hunted and do not have natural predators that have normal populations through natural regulation. Alligators have no natural predators and we are not stepping on them as we walk out the front door in Florida -- their population is very normal and it is not due to them being hunted.

But to take away all hunting would be like the example of the farmers and the wolves mentioned earlier. It's all a balance. We just have the ability to make killing deer illegal that the wolves don't.

You might be correct on this -- I haven't read enough from the DNR group or understood enough about the trend of wild animal populations. Of course, all I can find are very biased reports in quick searches. The NRA and hunters' associations say hunters are essential and we'd be overrun by deer without this form of control, while IDA ("In Defence of Animals") says that population studies indicate that after the hunting season, the numbers quickly return to a plateu and that number reduction from hunting makes no difference when viewed in the long run.

So I'll continue to do what I always do and argue my point with little or no information, being that I can't find any decent studies at the moment. Damn media groups.
:p

But thats the whole point of my argument, MANY hunters do kill to feed there families. The ass hole who hunted the mountain lion with the dogs, he is sick and twisted, the hunter that goes on a hunt simply for the head or antlers to mount on his wall, he is sick and twisted. All I am saying is don't lump them all together, because the ones who hunt to feed their families are doing the exact thing a farmer is doing when he kills a cow. Yes there are ass hole people out there, but don't give a group a bad name simply because of a select few.

If you can get them fresh, you're allowed to keep them in most states. Just notify the game warden.

Brigliadore wrote:
It's only "MANY" if you include the guys (and a few women) who take time off each year and spend thousands of dollars in order to bring back 60 pounds of venison for the freezer. For those people, who are the vast majority of hunters, eating what they kill is an afterthought.

godwulf, just because you can't see the difference between a human and an animal doesn't mean the hunters labor under the same handicap.

Kitsune, don't worry about the natural order of things. On the one hand, humans are predators and deer are prey, so killing them IS the natural order of things. On the other, humans have already killed off the other large predators, so the natural order of things is already interrupted. And while I wouldn't mind re-introducing a wolf population to handle the deer in Valley Forge Park, Fairmount Park, etc, lots of other humans would disagree.

Mice are a bad example because there still are plenty of mouse predators. Alligators are a bad example because they (like wolves, like people) are top predators; their populations are limited by available prey, not by predation.

russotto wrote:
From the number of other hunters and innocent bystanders shot and killed by hunters every year, apparently SOME of them do.

On a more serious note than either that aside or your entire post:
-Theodore Vitali, "The Ethics of Hunting: Killing as Life-Sustaining," Reason Papers 12 ( 1987)

That's from a pro-hunting statement, in which the author then goes on to justify the killing of wild animals to provide food for human consumption. The author is at least making an attempt to take the discussion out of the realm of the mindless "Hey, they're just animals" way of thinking, in which vanity, macho combat fantasies, family tradition, and virtually any other half-assed justification imaginable is sufficient to offset the evil of killing.

Yes, russotto, we do know they're animals - to assume that because they ARE animals, they are ours to kill without ever having to examine the morality of the deed is a gigantic case of begging the question.

It's not an afterthought, if it's part of the plan. The hunters I know plan to eat it, if they get it, from the beginning. The fact that it's not cost effective makes no difference.

No, I didn't mean an afterthought literally - like, "Hey, I've got this dead animal here, I'll bet I can eat it!" I meant that the actual consumption of the animal's flesh is not the primary reason that the killing is being done - which, given the far more economical methods of obtaining food that are available to most people, has got to be the norm rather than the exception.

Assuming that there is need to justify killing animals for food is begging the question in the other direction. To admit the need for such justification is to assume that there is some rule which killing animals for food appears to break, and that there is therefore need of justification for that violation.

The taking of a conscious animal life is not automatically or by default a morality-neutral action, simply because someone who wants to do it chooses not to want to think about it.

On one side of the equation are the indisuputable facts that an animal feels pain when shot, and that the animal wants to live; unless you've got a reason to consider those things to be relatively unimportant - or which, in other words, overrides the facts noted - then I would think that the rule of common decency, if nothing else, is something you might want to consider.

[quote]Originally posted by godwulf

The taking of a conscious animal life is not automatically or by default a morality-neutral action, simply because someone who wants to do it chooses not to want to think about it.


Again, you're trying to rig the game in your direction by using loaded language. Like it or not, you don't get to play "king of the hill" by announcing something like "killing animals is horrible" and then knocking down all justifications offered with "that's just not good enough".

As for your "fact" that people who want to kill animals don't want to think about it, I don't believe it's true.

russotto wrote:
Whose posts are you reading? What I wrote was:
and I invited you - or anyone - to tell me why the hunter's priorities should be considered to be so much more important than the animal's pain and the taking of its life.

As a matter of fact, I do think that "killing animals is horrible" in most circumstances, but what I'm attempting to do is to logically explain why I believe that's true.
What justifications have been offered? "We eat the meat"? "The animal doesn't suffer long"? "They're just animals, and we're humans"? "We've got to kill them now before they overpopulate and starve to death"? Hardly worth bothering to knock down, the lot of them. Have you got anything better?

dammit, i missed a hunting thread
 

godwulf, I don't think you're a hypocrite for eating meat while still being uncomfortable with the killing of animals. Actually, the fact that you eat meat means that there is still hope for the portion of your brain that has been poisoned by Disney's talking animals.

Ducks and geese are meat that haven't yet been made suitable for the plate. The morons who run them over with their cars for fun should be beaten, simply because they're being wasteful and stupid. No, the animals don't have any choice in the matter, because they aren't people.

Fox hunting is kind of sick, but I'm not going to take fox hunters to task, because it's actually the dogs that are directly chasing the fox. The hunters encourage it, and do the actual killing at the end of the chase, but they're no more or less evil than the pack they are following. Why doesn't anyone want to psychoanalyze the hounds?