I’m not talking about the consumption of animals here, to be clear. What I’m talking about is spending days and a bunch of money planning to kill something, doing the killing, and skinning/eviscerating what was killed, and often displaying the stuffed corpse. Hunters and fishers refuse to admit they’re obsessed with taking pleasure in killing something.
Miss me with the “tradition” stuff, it’s just peer pressure from the dead and a fallacious argument. Don’t tell me it’s to eat, like I said, I’m not talking about the consumption here, so please prove to me you are literate by not bringing up that point. And don’t tell me you’re respectful to the animals you kill; I don’t believe the planning, stalking, and killing is a good way to show respect.
Not many years ago, there was a big controversy involving a bit of park where a bunch of large bovines were released. They multiplied, and at some point there were more cows than food. Without any real predators to keep their numbers down, the choice was either “get rid of some” or “let a bunch of them starve”.
The people in charge chose to let nature take its course, as opposed to the normal choice of reducing their numbers by killing a bunch of them. Some animals would suffer, but humans wouldn’t need to intervene. Then a bunch of people got upset and started secretly entering their habitats, feeding the cows, setting them up for even worse famine next year. A bunch of them were killed anyway after that, under great protest of the cow lovers (who, of course, had neither the space nor the money to sustain those animals themselves).
I’m not opposed to hunting for population control in areas where natural predators aren’t around anymore. In my country there’s a huge controversy over a dozen or less wolves, but that’s no way to maintain a deer population that doesn’t graze itself into a slow starvation. You’re not shipping 300 deer and 200 boar to a zoo, but it’d be inhumane to let them all die slowly.
Another exception I’ll make is calling a hunter to put an animal out of its suffering after it got hit by a car. There’s no point in letting it bleed out with all of its ribs broken and its jaw smashed.
However, most hunters seem to be the types that really like killing. I can see the need to keep a couple around, but they sure sound like psychopaths when they talk about their hobby. Usually they’ll wrap it with “it’s good for the population” or whatever, but you can see in their eyes that they’re just making up excuses.
You’re not psychic, I’m afraid. It is impossible for you to know what anyone is thinking. Using what is ‘in their eyes’ to determine complex thought is absurd.
I know a lot of hunters and none of them like killing. They experience a complex series of emotions when they’re successful with a hunt. Triumph over all their hard work paying off, excitement over having a successful hunt, joy over having meat for half a year, and remorse, over having killed a beautiful animal. I do not know a single hunter who doesn’t experience remorse. I even know some people who have cried over what they’ve done. But in the end, they’ll do it again, because they’ve chosen a lifestyle where they’re willing to be active participants in the cycle of life, and aren’t willing to just outsource all of the killing for their meat needs.