On Hunting

I am new to hunting, having only began a few years ago, well into middle age. This is unusual–most American men (and it’s almost exclusively men) learn from their fathers and begin hunting at a young age. This dynamic is integral to the hunting ``culture”, which is very real and very toxic. It’s toxic because of the political implications, and all the other cultural trappings of modern American rural, conservative culture: Trump, guns, religion, masculinity and any other social issue one can think of. Hunting culture is one part of a larger in-group/out-group dynamic tgat pits ruralness and urbanness against each other. The joy of conservative hunting men on message boards trying to overcome their cognitive dissonance of elected Republican officials trying to sell off public land to the highest bidder (usually an oil, gas, mining, or logging interest) while justifying their vote for these same officials is almost too perfect.

The cultural attachments to hunting do a disservice to the concept of hunting, and make it almost impossible for individuals not steeped in this culture to understand it or to engage with it. Perhaps this is a feature, not a bug: hunters get to play the victim, an absolute pillar of modern conservativism, while also ensuring that crowds remain low and hunting does not become gentrified in the same way fly fishing has become. By playing the victim, I mean they get to complain that non-hunters (liberals) just don’t understand and that they persecute hunters over a wholly scientific, healthy, and environmentally beneficial activity.

I did not grow up in this culture and I certainly do not subscribe to the cultural and political trappings associated with hunting. But I realized very quickly that I love to hunt. But enjoying it is not enough. People enjoy many things that morally repugnant, but that does not justify their behavior. So there are two components to my thoughts about hunting: 1) is it morally acceptable to hunt? and 2) if yes, why is it enjoyable?

I am not a philosopher, but I do have training in ``how to think,” for lack of a better term through advanced education and my day job as an academic who writes in formal, technical language. The question of how to define a morally acceptable consumption activity is difficult because individual apply different standards to different activities. For example, I drive a small gas powered truck that gets about 20 miles to the gallon. I find the enormous trucks I’m surrounded by in rural American morally problematic both because of their effect on the environment and how dangerous they are to other drivers. But, this is an arbitrary line I have drawn, which we all do in our daily life. Here is how I think about hunting in terms of morality–for myself–which is the best I can do.

The more I think about eating meat in this country the more difficult it becomes to justify. It is one of those things that most people do not grapple with on a daily basis because it is difficult to think about, and when one does think hard about it, it becomes increasingly clear that modern meat production in this country is deeply problematic. Tremendous harm is imposed on animals, which live in what most of us consider inhumane conditions. During the pandemic, there were news stories about the harm imposed on workers in the meat industry, including stories that supervisors took bets on how many of their workers would die from COVID. A huge percentage of workers in the meat-packing industry are non-English speakers, immigrants (both legal and not), and are easily exploited. Forget the animals, the humans are also treated horribly.

The book, ``The Omnivore’s Dilemma” makes this point much better than I can, over the course of an entire book, but it is difficult to carefully think about commercial meat in this country and not come to the conclusion that a morally whole and conscious person should not be eating much commercial meat. Some people are able to stop eating any animal products altogether, or become a vegetarian, pescatarian, or the like. It is harder to justify to these people, though still possible, because they have dramatically changed their behavior in an altruistic way. For most of us though, this is extremely hard. Meat tastes good, it is interesting, it makes for a more joyful life. The absolutists will reject this because they know right from wrong, and eating meat is wrong. But again, no one is perfect. A vegan might not eat meat, but may commute 50 miles each way to work in a gas-guzzling car, whereas I eat meat but ride my bike to work. It’s simply impossibly to do the absolute correct thing in our daily lives.

The morally responsible among us might do the most obvious thing and make changes at the margins. Meatless Mondays or example, or take other steps to reduce their overall consumption. And these steps are good! It is very difficult to simply stop eating meat, but very easy to not eat meat one day a week, and the aggregate effects of these individual behavior changes are substantial. A logical next step then, is to replace commercial, factory farmed or inhumane meat with wild meat. Enter hunting.

There are a few common objections: the animals suffer, most people are trophy hunters only, it causes animals to become rarer or threatens extinction. Each of these can be easily addressed. Animals killed will suffer, hopefully briefly, just as anything suffers as it dies. But compared to animals living on feed lots of factory farms, the suffering must be much less, on average. Occasionally a hunter will miss a shot and hit an animal in a way that causes it to die over a few days, but commercial meat production results in collective animal suffering on a daily basis that dwarfs any suffering that occurs from a hunter’s bullet or arrow. And of course, the way animals meet their end in the wild as a result of their environment is rarely pretty. Most ungulates (deer, elk, moose) starve to death over the course of a few months.

Most hunters do prize bigger antlers as trophies, but hunters harvest the meat from all animals they kill in this country. It is the law. It is illegal to ``waste meat” and even if a hunter wants to shoot a large moose for example, they are required to save the meat. It is also the case that nearly all hunters value the meat for both cultural and culinary reasons. That is, the idea that hunters in this country shoot an animal for it’s antlers and leave the carcass is simply wrong. It does not happen except in very rare–and illegal–circumstances.

The last objection easy to deal with: hunting reduces animal populations. This is probably true, but the quantity of hunting licenses and tags (a tag is essentially a permit to shoot a specific animal) are determined by political and bureaucratic bodies which rely on scientific evidence. In this country, states regulation hunting, and states employ biologists who help determine license and tag policy. Is it perfect? No, just as any political outcome is not perfect; it does not lie at my ideal point or your ideal point. The policies are not exactly what I would set if I were in charge, but that is true for nearly every law ever created. An important principle people do not understand about politics is that the policies produced are the result of an aggregation of preferences, and just because a policy is not exactly what you want does not make it wrong or immoral. I struggle with predator hunting (that is, hunting animals like mountain lions or wolves). In my opinion, the science suggests the populations of these animals are declining and that states should greatly reduce the number of tags distributed for these (depending on the state). But there is absolutely zero chance hunting drives mountain lions or wolves to extinction. As far as the most commonly hunted mammals in the United States–deer and elk–all scientific evidence suggests that hunting has almost no negative effects on their populations. The deer population is in long-term decline in the West (though not in the East), but that is due to climate change, loss of habitat, and forest management practices, not hunting. Elk populations are too high in many places and hunting is needed to control them. (Elk numbers are increasing because they are less sensitive to extreme weather events and loss of habitat, and there are fewer predators to reduce their numbers in most western states).

Setting aside the moral objection that killing any animals is always wrong (which is a standard most of us would fail given our food, clothes, bug spray, etc.), all other moral claims fall away. There are positive moral arguments as well. The claims collapse to an objection about hunting culture, and more broadly, the politics associated with it. I too find the politics objectionable, but this has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with modern political polarization and culture. Other cultural identifiers are wrapped up in this. Hunters use guns and guns, along with gun companies and the NRA are morally bankrupt. I agree with this, and while I own guns, I also believe in gun control.