Last month it was revealed that Rep Hugh McKean, in Loveland, Colorado, has introduced a bill which “requires local education providers, upon entering into an agreement with an individual or entity to provide a hunter education course, to require all seventh graders to complete a course offered by the local education provider”. If you managed to decipher that incredibly awkward syntax, you might be as shocked as I was to learn that kids as young as 12 are being forced to take a hunting course. There’s no opt out for children who may be morally or ethically opposed to hunting, although they can refuse ‘hands on’ activities.
A few weeks ago we were given Lawrence Cahoone’s infamous justification of “Hunting as a Moral Good” to read as part of our MSc studies. You can imagine how that went down on an animal welfare course. Cahoone argues that hunting is not a sport, but ‘a neo-traditional cultural trophic practice consistent with ecological ethics, including a meliorist concern for animal rights or welfare’. Really? Hunting represents real progress for animal rights?
Nope. The only possible instance when hunting a wild animal can be morally justified is if you have no other option in order to survive. The one justifiable motivation would be to kill and eat the animal because you have no other viable food options. Yet between 100 and 200 million animals are killed annually by hunters in the US (Bekoff and Pierce, 2017). That’s a whole lot of ‘starving’ hunters.
Given that this justification can’t reasonably be used by the majority of people in western society, many of these hunters assert that killing wild animals is a more ethical option than buying farmed animal meat, taking a similar position, for instance, to those who consider that catching wild fish is ‘better’ than aquaculture. It’s certainly true that at least the wild animal had a life of freedom, hopefully with minimal suffering, before slaughter. Indeed, Cahoone argues that death by hunter is ‘on average’ less painful than death in wild nature (2009). Hmmm. In fishing, the death of a hooked fish in open seas is a horrific, prolonged ordeal, more so than slaughter in aquaculture. The same applies for hunted animals on land, despite many hunters’ insistence that a ‘clean kill’ offers a humane death. Incompetence, accident, inappropriate equipment or technique, or poor visibility or conditions can cause an injured animal to escape, prolonging their suffering. Thiriet states that it can take an hour for an animal hit by an arrow to die and, in one study, 13 percent of bow hunters admitted to not recovering their prey (2012). Even if the animal escapes injury, he or she can still suffer enormously. In one paper, researchers tracked red deer who were hunted by people with dogs. These deer covered an average of 19 km, depleting carbohydrate resources and disrupting muscle tissues. They also had elevated levels of beta-endorphins and high concentrations of cortisol, suggesting extreme stress (Bateson and Bradshaw, 1997).
Some hunters justify their sport as necessary for the preservation of ecosystems or species, a means of ‘wildlife management’. Yet hunting more often disrupts the gene pool, with larger, more biologically successful animals particularly targeted (after all, bigger formally-fierce dead animals make for better selfies). Being hunted also disrupts animals’ natural activities, forcing them to alter their ‘activity budgets’ i.e., they may increase their vigilance, leaving less time for foraging and other behaviours. Andres Ordiz studied the movement of brown bears in Scandinavia, before and after the start of hunting season. Normally bears would increase their daytime activity as winter approaches and the days shorten. But because of the presence of hunters, they decreased daytime activity and moved more during dark hours, disrupting their rest time. This interrupted hyperphagia, when they need to store fat reserves before hibernation, critical for reproduction (Ordiz et al., 2012).
Cahoone concludes that in some cases hunting is not only permissible but morally good compared with farming, because less animals may be killed to get more calories. But even if killing an animal in the wild is ‘better’ than buying one who has led a whole life of suffering in captivity, we live in a society where nobody has to eat meat. The western hunter has another choice: not to eat an animal at all. If hunters were truly killing wild animals as an ethical protest against farming, demonstrating Cahoone’s so-called ‘meliorist concern for animal rights or welfare’, they would surely be vegetarian apart from the meat they kill themselves. I seriously doubt this is the case for many, if any, western hunters. These people aren’t substituting farmed meat with wild animal meat, they’re eating both.
Ultimately, any moral justification of hunting by a person who lives in close proximity to civilisation, where they can buy or even grow plant-based food, is purely an excuse for an activity that brings them sadistic pleasure. It’s very well to say that killing your own meat is an act of ‘appreciation’ and ‘respect’ for the animal, but this conflicts with the beaming smiles displayed by proud hunters posing next to their dead victims. These hunters are having a lot of fun partaking in this ‘unique experience of animal inter-dependence’ (Cahoone, 2012). In a 2015 paper, researchers conclude that the odds of true ‘pleasure’ smiles are greater when hunters pose with prey, with large versus small prey, and with carnivores versus herbivores (Child and Darimont, 2015). One of the researchers asserted that ‘you can’t fake a pleasure smile, you can’t do it on demand.’
People can put forward all kinds of moral justification for hunting, but the most convincing reason seems to be simply that killing animals makes them happy.
References
Bateson, P. and Bradshaw, E. L. (1997). Physiological effects of hunting red deer (Cervus elaphus). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 264, 1707-1714.
Bekoff, M. and Pierce, J. (2017). The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age, Beacon Press.
Cahoone, L. (2009). Hunting as a moral good. Environmental Values, 18, 67-89.
Child, K. and Darimont, C. (2015). Hunting for trophies: online hunting photographs reveal achievement satisfaction with large and dangerous prey. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 20, 531-541.
Ordiz, A. et al. (2012). Do bears know they are being hunted? Biological Conservation, 152, 21-28.
Thiriet, D. (2012). Recreational, conservation and traditional hunting: the ethical dimensions. In: Animal Welfare and Ethics: From Principles to Practice. Proceedings of the 2012 RSPCA Australia Scientific Seminar. 28 Feb. 12-19.
