Where does hunting fall in the ethical category? Now, with the conventional animal rights approach, it is a definite no-no. And this makes sense; killing an animal is wrong, so how can hunting be right? It involves ending the life of an animal in a painful manner, thus depriving it of its own valuable right to life. Definitely wrong. Correct?
But...this situation isn't so simple. There are further implications of hunting. Most notably that there are actually positive consequences. Lets throw away the entire pretense of this blog post for a minute, and think about what can be positive about hunting; particularly deer hunting. Why is there a hunting season? Well, for sport I guess, but why is the control so strict? Why is gun season only one week long? The answer for this is population control. The whole reason we even have hunting as far as the government is concerned is to control animal populations. If an animal population swells far above what the ecosystem can maintain, many animals will die of starvation; quite painful. Another pretty negative side effect of high deer population is the incredible increase in cars hitting deer. This not only kills the deer, but damages vehicles and causes injuries, even deaths to drivers. If we don't contain them, they overrun. If they overrun, we kill them with our cars, they starve to death. Not much positive there. If we do control them, many are killed by artificial means, but the remaining population lives better, and less deer are hit by cars.
So, with that said, what is right? Quite frankly, I'm not sure. I personally choose not to hunt. Since not everyone is required to believe the same on the topic of animal rights, are people who hunt also right in their own sense? I know this is starting to sound like a bit of ethical relativism, but maybe there is a little going on here? By hunting, you are doing bad, but in a roundabout way causing good. By not hunting, you are doing good, but in a a roundabout way doing bad. Quite a paradox. Now of course this wouldn't be an issue if we didn't destroy the populations of their natural predators, the wolf, but wolves in the system also involve the death of many deer. You cannot stop the food chain from happening, so I guess it is just who to 'blame' for the dirty job of being at the top.
After writing this, I am not a whole lot closer to completely defining what I believe, but there was some progress. I am interested to hear your thoughts.
I request a paradigm shift. The deer are not the problem, we are. The only way that we can consider deer to be overpopulated is in the context of the habitats that we have "allowed" them to keep. Deer probably do not want to cross roads. We build them through habitats and when there is something more appealing on the other side of the road, they're going to pursue it.
ReplyDeleteTrying to justify hunting by pointing out that wolves would kill deer anyway is on pretty weak ground. Wolves do not have the ability to consider their actions and therefore cannot be blamed for the "dirty work" of being on the top of the food chain. Humans can consider the implications of eating animals and have the proper biochemistry to not need to kill animals to eat. So, when a human hunts a deer blame is deserved. When a wolf hunts a deer, there is no blame.
Anyway, my paradigm shift. If we're truly concerned with species overpopulating Earth, let's take a look at ourselves. If we didn't have a huge population that demanded a lot of space, other populations would not be cramped in habitats that we have left for them. I don't think there was a deer population "problem" before the industrialization of North America.
So, that's great and all, right? In an ideal world, we could stop using so much of the earth and let other species have some more space. We need to be realistic, though. The human population is increasing and I don't think we're going to stop building malls any time soon. So, what should we do instead of hunt?
One possible solution is to sterilize some deer. I don't think this is a great solution because past dabbling with wild animal populations hasn't gone that well. I support altering companion animals, but that's a little different. This seems like a pretty severe rights violation to me.
I think going forward we really need to consider animal populations when building. Let's think about how our developments affect non-humans. Avoid putting roads through habitats, leave plenty of unmolested space that the animals can enjoy. Hopefully this will cause them to stay in the area and not cross roads.
I don't think we should feel that its better to hunt deer than allow the ecosystem to balance the population through starvation. That's the way it works out there. Nature is pretty good at regulating things. I maintain that it's a little off balance because of human manipulation.
Let me try to summarize my thoughts. I think we've done non-human animal populations an injustice as we've expanded. So, how do we propose to fix that? With another injustice, hunting them. That doesn't feel right.
It is perfectly logical to say we are the problem, as we are the ones who have destroyed their habitats. We cannot easily change this though, we can only temper its spreading. Considering what we build and its effect on the wildlife populations can only go so far. Ideally, planners would care about this. Unfortunately, I would venture to say it isn't given the careful consideration it deserves.
ReplyDeleteYou remark that nature does a pretty good job of regulating itself. Yes and no, I would say. Yes, the deer population will return to normal after a season of much starvation. The problem is this would be cyclical. There will always come a time when deer are overpopulated and our silly roads get in the way of their walking.
I concede the part about predation is pretty weak. Thanks for clarifying in concise ethical terms where that argument fails.
Back to the overpopulation topic - To briefly play the devil's advocate; isn't it possible that more deer would die from starvation than from hunting? So would hunting be the more desirable alternative, as it would make more deer have a maximization of life/happiness? I assume your response will be along the lines of the animals died of natural causes, not killed by people. Yes, that is right, but starvation surely is painful, and more would undergo starvation than lose their life to a weapon. Is it more a matter of who's doing it, not how its done?
This topic confuses me, as I am against the killing of animals for sport. I am also trying to be somewhat realistic about it. These two very much disagree though, and I'm left with no idea what to think. You are correct that one injustice doesn't deserve another, but what is the feasible alternative?
I'm not following the logic about the problem being cyclical.
ReplyDeleteThere are many humans on Earth right now that are starving. We could ease their suffering by hunting them. That would reduce the human population "problem", too. I don't think many people would find the utilitarian argument compelling if we were discussing people instead of deer, though.
The utilitarian arithmetic supposes that we know how many deer would die from starvation and possibly which deer specifically would die. We never will, which makes it a poor moral philosophy in this case.
Humanity is in quite a pickle once again (we seem to be pretty good at that as a species) I think the alternative is working to change the paradigm about how we interact with other species through education and discussion. Once we're talking about how we should not simply kill every species that gets in our way, we may find some creative solutions. Maybe we can leverage the audible range of deer hearing to make devices that emit an unpleasant sound next to a road. I'm not sure what it would be right now, but when we've got a coherent goal humans are pretty good at figuring at creative solutions.
For the cyclical thing, the deer population will follow a cycle of high population followed by a collapse. When the ecosystem rebuilds the food supply, they will once again explode in population. The cycle repeats.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about my utilitarian argument in that way. Point well taken.
We will never know the arithmetic. You are correct. Just guesswork by people studying the deer.
I heard something once about reflectors on the road that make some weird effect that freaks out deer, but I believe it was cost prohibitive. I'll do some googling if I think about it later. I would say the major problem for deterring deer on the road is cost. Also, the minority is against it, so I guess the majority will continue ruling (and hunting) for now :/