Trophy Hunting Good?!

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that's ALWAYS the moral question.  If by doing some harm, you can prevent even more harm, or even cause a good of greater magnitude, how do you stand?  Do you avoid doing any harm personally, or do you commit the evil in order to serve the greater good?  Here's a question-- what if instead of deer, we come to the conclusion that HUMAN population density is likely to lead to wipeout-proportion disease spread, strangulation due to lack of resources and so on.  Do we commit the necessary evil of thinning out the herd?

Is even the horrific evil of war ultimately likely to lead to a net negative?

 
We've done it before.  We'll do it again.  I suppose it get's lost in our experience today, but when our situation was much closer to wildlifes, we did kill the diseased, the crippled, or the mouth too many.  We still have the odd debate about assisted euthanasia now.  We're more likely to come to the realization of limiting population growth than reducing population density, however.  Difficult to get deer on the pill.  I;m probably the wrong guy for this one, being an equal opportunity shooter. For every round I've sent downrange at a deer I've sent dozens at people, lol.

Joe Rogan makes a pretty good point.  The status quo for nature is that either you die of illness, you bleed out from injury, or something bigger than you rips you apart, starting from your asshole, and you die in horrible agony.  In some sense, a shot to the head or heart is the animal world equivalent of dying in your sleep, right?

It's better than chronic wasting disease.  

But maybe harm isn't so much in the suffering in that sense, as in the inability of the individuals to live (and die) according to their nature.  You are taking an animal that would have experienced the morning sunlight thousands more times, enjoyed eating fresh sprigs in springtime, had a chance to mate again. . .

They've definitely lost whatever sunsets and sexcapades might have been in store for them from this day to their last.  

Again, it's very hard to arrive at a good picture of what harm is.  I'd say for animals to be enclosed in tight spaces is suffering.  Separating a cow from her calves certainly must produce a great deal of suffering in both, but we do that with puppies, so. . .

Enclosed in tight spaces does produce suffering (not in all livestock, though), being separated from calves...probably not so much in both..but iirc there was a study that showed that the calves grew up to be less social.  Gotta remember that most animals don't appear to be as sentimental or clingy about their kids as we are.

It's a lot more ambiguous than people of either side generally admit to.  Maybe Aroura is on to something by looking at it through an environmental lens: at least there's some degree of objectivity to be found there.

IDK, like I suggested earlier, whether or not there is some ambiguity -must- depend on whether or not a person considers killing an animal unambiguously immoral in and of itself.  A bad act in need of positive modification. Without that bit of certainty, there's just nothing to weigh on any scale.   Because I don't consider killing animals unambiguously, or objectively, immoral.... there's nothing to weigh or create ambiguity later on down the line.