The morality of hunting.

I’ve recently reencountered an old, yet disturbing trend. National Geographic’s Instagram account, though at times a bit preachy, is a fantastic resource for pictures of the natural world.

Today, “natgeo” posted a picture of a man and his son in a duck blind located in the marshes outside of San Francisco. A few of the most recent user comments caught my eye…

“Why don’t we get all the hunters to go into the swamps and let them hunt each other with their guns? They’d enjoy it, the ducks would be left in peace, and the hunters would eradicate themselves for us.”

“Sickening”

“The worrying thing about hunting is the strange sadistic nature of being ‘proud’ of your kill, in the factories they are aware that it is a process that needs to be done if people want to eat meat on a mass scale, hunting is unnecessary as it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, doesn’t mass produce, and takes strange pride and pleasure in the potential slow death of an animal.”

“I bet they call themselves ‘Christian’.”

“…you don’t need to become vegetarian to understand that killing is stupid.”

Perhaps the most troubling of them all, is…

“Duck hunting is stupid; hunting is stupid. We create our food, we don’t need that nonsense anymore.”

Arguing with people over the internet is as futile as… well… arguing with people on the internet. No one will stop to consider a counter-point. The battle lines are always drawn from the very outset.

So I figured it would be healthier for me to explain my viewpoint (read: vent some steam) in my blog that very few people are likely to read or be offended.

Vegetarians and vegans have every right to ignore their canine teeth and declare the hunting of animals as wrong. But every single meat-eating person that replies negatively to this picture is a hypocrite. Every person that thinks industrially farm raised meat doesn’t suffer before it dies is deluded.

Hunters spend a lot of time and energy discussing humane hunting practices. Too light a load to consistently drop a pheasant dead in the air is frowned upon. Taking shots you shouldn’t from distances too far away to minimize the chance of maiming rather than killing are greatly discouraged in the hunting world.

Do one iota of research on industrial meat farms and let me know if this amount of care is given to the treatment of animals. Why is it somehow more ethical for food to be unrecognizable from its original form, and killed en masse by a faceless corporation, than it is to hunt your own?

Couple that with the amount of hormones and chemicals that are used to produce the biggest, juiciest animal, and keep the meat sanitary? The argument for supermarket meat starts to diminish.

But I suppose ignorance is bliss, and as long as you don’t think too hard, you can maintain your false moral high ground.