The Ethics Around Hunting

The practice of hunting is as old as we homo sapiens are. It has existed before us through the activity of other species and has continued to be a practice amongst humans into the modern technological era. Hunting, in recent years, has become a polarizing topic with regard to animal rights. There is a multitude of questions with regards to hunting on the minds of many and it can be narrowed down to about 3 for simplicities sake: 1. Why do we still hunt animals? 2. Is it ethical to hunt animals? 3. What are the alternatives to hunting and are these alternatives more ethical? These are obviously loaded questions and need to be taken into consideration diligently; but it is important to understand the history of hunting, in order to get a better picture of the practice as it is performed today. As we will see, there is no one particular answer to the latter two questions, as many people view ethics differently, but this needn’t stop us from having an honest dialogue about the phenomenon of hunting and its ethical implications -or lack thereof. Also there is a direct connection between the latter two questions because some alternatives -according to some- may be less ethical than hunting, and some alternatives are explicitly more ethical.

Human hunting — let alone hunting in general — predates homo sapiens. This is because all animals that were in the homo genus are considered human, and the fossil record shows that roughly 1.8–1.9 million years ago, homo Erectus as a species was showing physiological changes that indicated both hunting and meat-eating — along with tools and animal fossils that indicate markings of being hunted. It seems to be that humans were hunter/gatherers up until around 12,000 years ago, which was when humans transitioned into agriculture as a way of obtaining a source of food. Contrary to popular belief, however, hunter/gatherer societies did more gathering than hunting, as humans are physiologically weak -as opposed to the rest of the animal kingdom- and required tools in order to hunt. Stone tools made by homo Erectus for hunting were not as sophisticated as the tools that prehistoric homo sapiens developed; the former used more close-range tools like stone axes and the latter developed…