The hunting of animals is often a debate in the circle of animal rights. Do animals in nature deserve moral rights? Can humans be justified in disrupting the integrity, stability, and beauty of a biotic community? Are humans a part of nature and should we consider ourselves better or equal to the animals we hunt for sport, sustenance, and the thrill of the hunt? I personally believe that hunting should not be considered morally unjust because of the thrill and pleasure of hunting, being one with nature, and the fact that we have already harmed the biotic community so all we’re doing is being a part of what we’ve created. We are not a part of nature, but we can be a part of the version of nature that we’ve created over the years. In fact, I believe that it is our moral duty to be a part of what we’ve created to make amends. In my paper, I will explain not only why I believe hunting is not immoral, but also how not hunting is immoral.

Most of my subjective opinion on hunting comes from the ethical tool of Utilitarianism or the idea that the moral worth of an action comes from its level of utility. Utility being how much good can come from doing something that could be considered immoral. We can be both utilitarians and hedonistic utilitarians out in the wilderness. I back up this opinion because we continue to hunt because of how much pleasure we get out of hunting and by saying that we can do some measurable good in nature nowadays after years of torturing Mother Nature to almost a sex change. We’ve killed off most of the predators in the wilderness and have unfortunately hurt the ecosystem to the point where animals need us to kill them. Letting them freeze to death and go to waste would not be very utilitarian or even Kantian meaning respecting the animals as ends rather than means. As for how humans greatly benefit from hunting, the consequences would be enormous if we were to stop. There would be rotting animal corpses in many more areas, we would have a much higher rate of car accidents, and the mere pleasure of being as one with nature as you can get these days would be lost. The consequences of not hunting for animals and humans plus the pleasure as a form of utility that people get from hunting seem to outweigh the idea that hunting is immoral because of how so much good can come from it and how much bad can be prevented.

The primitivist philosopher would say that hunting can be as pleasurable as sex in some cases, but in a more spiritual, holistic way. Outlawing hunting in our nature preserves could deny many people the utility they crave as being part of their primitive roots. People have hunted since the beginning of time as means of sustenance and sport so why should this be denied in our culture today. In a PBS documentary on the works of Aldo Leopold, a famous environmental philosopher and activist, a friend of his by the name of Bob Marshall traveled to northern Alaska and met people that didn’t rely on washing machines, Ipods, and the pursuit of money as their main tenets of life. He thinks that these people seemed to be happier to him than the people he knew in the lower 48 states because they were more primitive. They had a society, unique rituals, and did many activities such as hunting that other people he knew do, but they always did it in a more primitive way. Hunting is a primitive activity and we may not be very primitive anymore with our controlled areas of wilderness, but hunting animals is important because it brings us a little closer to nature even though we may have lost our actual niche there long ago.

Although becoming more primitive in some instances, like when we go hunting, can be a good thing, I don’t believe that we’ve lost our human nature by becoming less primitive. The word primitive to me seems to have some violent and negative connotations with it, which to some people may help them believe that primitive humans are naturally violent, but to me this is not the case. I believe that humans have been socialized to be bad and we think that’s our nature because we compare ourselves to it because we’ve often looked to nature as a source of our morality for so many years. In some cases it can be good to admire primitive nature because of its beauty, but an environmental philosopher by the name of John Stuart Mill would back me up when I say that nature is not something to perceive as moral or something to admire (124-125). While it is a good thing that some people have become less primitive in recent times, it is not a source of morality. Not only because it is hard to define nature and that the natural world is completely different from ours, but because in the past, nature has caused more deaths and suffering with famine, severe weather, and disease than any group or individual humans have or will ever be able to cause with all of our societal-made problems like war, racism, slavery, violence, sexism, speciesm, rape, ageism, and competition combined. I would like to argue that maybe there is no human nature because the ways that we have affected nature don’t seem to mix with the normal problems that nature has always caused in the past. Global warming, Peak oil, and the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species, both plant and animal, per year are all man-made problems in nature that gloom on the horizon to be unimaginably catastrophic.

My depressing rant on our nature and the nature of nature I bring up because I believe that hunting is not the most immoral activity to look at on the topic of animal rights and the environment in general. Testing the toxicity of floor polish on dogs by pouring it down their throats until they die, commercial farming of millions of scared, nervous animals, and forcing animals to fight are in my opinion a behemoth more immoral than the hunting of deer, rabbits, and squirrels. Hunters do not disturb the biotic community, in fact they want to be there and I would say that they are needed because of the fact that we killed off all the predators during the early 1900’s. A man named Baird Callicot says that Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of protecting the ecosystem is great, but we’ve already harmed the ecosystem greatly. The hunters back then were not justified in killing off the predators, but hunters today with governmental regulations, hunter safety, and a more aware idea of the environmental problems facing today I would consider to be very moral utilitarian agents. As I said earlier, hunters gain certain pleasures out of hunting and also I would like to bring up that there is one particular type of hunter, besides subsistence hunters, that can be virtuous and morally justified in doing what they love.

According to the hunting philosopher Jon Jenson, an environmentally virtuous hunter is one that hunts for the sake of hunting and gets intrinsic value from it. Not solely for hedonistic pleasure, but the thrill of being able to track down an animal that thinks nothing like you and then appreciating what you take from it. They would also hunt because they see it as a hobby to enjoy and develop your skills. This is the polar opposite of an environmentally non-virtuous hunter or someone more like a sport hunter who hunts for the trophy, with a semi-automatic machine gun, and then talks about how he loved how it shook on the ground while it writhed in pain. This type of hunter is in my opinion immoral and not someone to be admired. The admirable virtuous hunter is someone who displays humility, respectfulness, and prudence while he develops his skill. I personally believe that anyone who believes in self-improvement alone can be somewhat admired as virtuous and moral. So the question is not so much is hunting immoral, but are the hunters good moral agents in nature? If they are moral, then the only thing left to go over is hunting fair to the animals?

All people, whether believers in animal rights or sport hunters, believe in the some sense of importance, relevance, and the greatness in human beings. This is because we have rationality, intelligence, and reason, which seem to set us above the animals we hunt. While these are good reasons, I believe more as Mahatma Gandhi would have put it, the concept of the welfare of all, which includes equality for animals, plants, rocks, humans, the cosmos, and everything else. So while I do agree that humans are pretty great, I am also a big fan of animal rights and equality. However, there aren’t many people who believe in these idealistic dreams of mine and there are especially not many who even think about them. That being said if I believe in equality then all people deserve their subjective opinions on what makes them happy and how to live their lives. So if I believe that I am not always right, then other people should to able to keep eating meat if they want to even if I find it immoral (I admit to being a hypocrite, for I eat meat as well). If other people want to eat meat that’s fine, but strangely, to go back to the topic at hand, I find it slightly utilitarian when it comes to eating meat and hunting if we meat-eaters are going to eat meat and are not planning to stop. Commercial farming stuffs animals in areas worse than the concentration camps during World War II and these animals are deprived of any free-space to roam, move, and live what a farm animal would call a life worth living. With hunting at least the animals get to live a decently long and free life before they are hunted, killed, and served on the dinner table similar to something from the immoral commercial farm mentioned earlier.

By reading this paper I hope that I have instilled some new thoughts to you on the morality of hunting and animal rights in general. It is my opinion that what we call nature is not natural anymore, but an altered nature that we have created from years of neglect and abuse. Aldo Leopold would say that harming the integrity, beauty, and stability of a biotic community is immoral. If that’s true, then we have undoubtedly been immoral over the past thousand years that humans have dominated the planet. We continue to dominate the planet, but we are acting morally with what we’ve created. We act as the new predators in the ecosystem and as long as we use meat to its full potential we are not acting immorally to the animals. On the other hand though, less can be said about the morality of commercial farming. But in the wilderness, however, we seem to be helping them and ourselves more by killing them, but as long as we can act as environmentally virtuous hunters in the ecosystem we should be allowed to continue hunting.