Hunting Utilitarianism

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.