Killing an animal that could have been left alone needs a justification recreation cannot supply

The argument

The central objection to hunting is that it takes a life which did not need to be taken. An animal capable of feeling pain, of fearing, of avoiding threats and of caring for its young has an interest in continuing to live, and that interest is not cancelled by the fact that it cannot articulate it. On this view, killing such an animal requires a justification proportionate to the loss, and the ordinary justification offered for hunting does not meet that standard. Someone who can buy food, who is in no danger, and who kills because the activity is absorbing has set an animal's life against an afternoon's enjoyment. Critics stress that this is not an argument about cruelty in the narrow sense of deliberate torment. A hunter may be skilled, careful and respectful, kill quickly and waste nothing, and the objection still stands, because the objection is to the killing rather than to the manner of it. Where the manner does matter, opponents argue, it tends to count against hunting rather than for it: an animal is tracked while alert and frightened, is often wounded rather than killed outright, and may travel some distance before dying where no one is watching. The pleasure attached to the practice is treated as an aggravating feature rather than an incidental one. Opponents argue that enjoying the pursuit and the kill trains a disposition to treat living things as material for sport, and that a society which licenses that enjoyment makes a public statement about how much an animal's life is worth. Even granting that some killing of animals is unavoidable, they conclude, killing that is avoidable and undertaken for recreation is the clearest case of a death that should not have happened.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Hunters reply that the argument proves too much, since almost nothing anyone does for enjoyment is strictly necessary, and that the same reasoning would condemn eating meat, keeping pets or building on land that animals live on. They dispute the picture of motive, arguing that what hunters enjoy is tracking, skill, the outdoors and the food rather than the death itself, and that a practice can be pursued with pleasure without the pleasure being taken in suffering. They also argue that the animal in question would die anyway, often more slowly, of starvation, disease or predation, so the comparison is not between death and a long life but between one death and another. Finally they note that condemning hunting while tolerating industrial meat production singles out the visible case.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That these animals can suffer is not disputed, but having an interest in continuing to live is a further philosophical claim that is harder to establish for animals without a sense of their own future. [Rejecting P2] Proportionality cuts both ways: if an animal's death is a smaller loss than a human one, substantial human goods such as food, skill and land management can outweigh it. [Rejecting P3] An animal left alone in a managed landscape faces starvation, disease or predation rather than a long and peaceful life. [Rejecting C] Condemning the practice while accepting industrial meat production singles out the visible killing rather than the larger one.