Trophy Hunting Good?!

[bennyboy]

You think the 500lb whale eating his 5th Big Mac of the day has a better claim to the death and suffering of an animal than a guy who wants to go out in the wild and test his skills and endurance?

Then let the phony bastard go out with a flint-tipped spear instead of a high powered rifle with a telescopic sight.  Personally, I'd love to see all of them with an antler up their asses.

And, for the record, when I hunt down a t-bone steak in the grocery store I do not stop to take a trophy of it as if I was some great white hunter.

I think there's a false dilemma here: kill animals for your Big Mac, or kill them for trophies.

There's a viable option-- minimize animal suffering and death as much as possible.  You don't get brownie points for WHY you are complicit in suffering and death, and I don't think you are right to criticize the motivations of others.

We need VERY little meat.  By very, I mean none if you live in a Western country and are willing to work on your diet-- and just a few hundred grams here or there if you are lazy.

How many animals die to trophy hunters?  Maybe a few thousand a year (just guessing)?  How many animals die to McDonald's that nobody gives a shit about?  Probably more each year than have ever existed in the wild, in all the time the Earth has existed.

Yeah, trophy hunting is pretty sick.  Humanity's effect in general is pretty disgusting in a lot of ways, and we rarely stop to really consider what that means.

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And I'm not usually one to agree with Benny, but I've been working on going vegetarian for a while.  In Germany, it hasn't been easy!
There are so many moral reasons to do it.  Not least the conservation of energy.  But I'm also aware that some veggies are just as bad energy consumers as meat, if hothouse grown or flown a distance.  

1. Nice to have you in my corner for a change.
2. There's another issue that is more troubling-- industrial-scale harvesting almost certainly involves the deaths or suffering from pesticides of all kinds of critters: birds, moles, mice, snakes, frogs, and who knows what else. Sometimes I think eating 1 grazing cow a year instead of some of those vegetables might actually net a reduction in loss of life.

I don't want really to undermine people's outrage about cruelty toward animals in any form. But I'd like the OP and others to consider taking a step FURTHER-- lift up your head, consider your impact on the environment and on the net suffering in the world, and consider reducing meat intake very greatly, avoiding buying foods shipped from distant places, etc. I know there are a lot of ways each of us can improve, and there's only so much time and focus to give, but I think this issue might be worth some of that time and focus.