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I'm about as left as they come but weirdly enough I'm also a hunter, and I have to disagree, the guns I own are tools designed for specific purposes that aren't killing humans. Hunting turkey, hunting deer, hunting duck, I even have a muzzleloader for that season, and a gun for back packing and hunting out of a saddle in a tree.
Hunting IMO is way more sustainable and ethical than buying store bought meat and it connects me with nature and let's me first hand observe, appreciate, value, and want to protect ecology of my area.
How is hunting sustainable? It's currently sustainable because a small number of people do it. I can't see how it would be more sustainable than farmed, storebought meat.
From what I understand, it's sustainable because hunters kill overpopulated species like deer. The deer become overpopulated due to lack of predators in the area and end up damaging the ecosystem by eating all the plants
Indeed. "Hunting is more sustainable than farming" is an idiotic assertion.
It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.
You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.
I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I'm not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we'll see.
Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you'd have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.
Killing animals isn't ethical. Inevitably the false dilemma gets painted between killing them or overpopulation, but the overpopulation is also a human-created problem, both through overdevelopment and killing off natural predators - the actual antidote is to scale back our development, or reintroduce predators, or simply let other natural stressors manage the population. Plant-based/vegan diet is far more ethical (nonsense about "plants feel pain", "mice killed by plows", "I can't eat vegan because of my blood type" and other vegan bingo card BS aside).
This comment right here. Carnists are always arguing in bad faith.
it's not a false dilemma. it's a real dilemma. and your solution is also to kill them.
Taking just the "solution" of reintroducing predators - it's still not the same. Predation specifically targets old, weak, sick members of a herd. What do hunters do? It's what, a tag limit and age limit, and that's it.
This whole conversation always seems so disingenuous. People doing hunting claim these altruistic motives, but have every adverse incentive that has nothing to do with those motives, from stocking their freezers to just bragging about what they hunted. Let's be for real here, you're not scientists or veterinarians carefully monitoring and managing a population, what you're doing is taking the first justification you can find for what you already wanted to do.
no, it's not the same, but your solution is also to kill them. if that happens, and people can benefit above and beyond balancing the ecosystem, that's even better.
Uh-huh. So of all the options - just shooting adult deer, or restoring the ecosystem to the way it was, or actual scientific approaches like sterilization, you're only interested in the one that benefits you, and then you start ignoring the moral implications, and associated risks like humans getting shot. See, the conversation would go smoother if you just declare from the outset that you only care about what benefits you, and we could drop the pretense that this is about what's actually the best solution.
being snide is unnecessary. you can apologize.
you didn't raise any moral implications. like what?
Right whales would like a word.
Sorry, which part of killing animals fixes a landscape or its residents? What are you protecting by killing something? Does Fonzie need to give Ritchie another speech about Two Wrongs and a Right?
I am anti gun in almost every way, but I know where I live, deer populations get out of control. I've never hunted, nor do I have any desire to, but the fact is that if we didn't cull the deer population periodically, they would breed themselves into starvation and cause who knows what kinds of damage to themselves and their ecosystem.
As unfortunate as it is, it's a thing that has to be done for their own good and for the good of this area. I'm sure it's like that in lots of places with lots of different species.
Agreed; and want to add it’s probably because people killed off the predators that kept the deer population in check.
Either that or they were brought to places where they didn't have predators. Either way, it's definitely our fault. We love fucking up natural habits.
WTF, whales have NOTHING to do with anything they said.
Derailing with strawman fallacy and red herrings undermines anything you say coming across as broken AI chatbot
You pushed the predators out of the area you live by living there. Not just your ancestors are guilty, you participate in disrupting the ecosystem by simply living. Without predators, prey animals overpopulate and destroy the ecosystem themselves.
Either give up your living space for the predators to balance out the ecosystem you live in, or do the balancing yourself. Don't sit here being a self-righteous prat and bitch about people hunting when you're fucking up the local habitat yourself.
Yes, I think mostly it was farmers who deforested the planet; and are still doing it.