I think that still leaves open the issue of humans hunting animals for sport. For example, if someone enjoys hunting lions, is that "a good reason", in the same way that someone enjoying torturing a house cat is "not a good reason"?
Fortunately I think there is a simple resolution to this question, in that torturing animals is heavily associated with (if not predictive or causative of) a tendency to harm humans too, and so it should be forbidden for that reason alone.
Similarly, it is justified to ban specifically hunting which leads to extinction of rare animals on the basis that the existence of these animals is part of the common cultural heritage of humanity and therefore no one has a right to prevent future generations from enjoying it.
>> I think that still leaves open the issue of humans hunting animals for sport. For example, if someone enjoys hunting lions, is that "a good reason", in the same way that someone enjoying torturing a house cat is "not a good reason"?
I honestly don't think so. In the same way, I don't think it's a good reason to rape someone because it would give the rapist pleasure.
There has to be a balance, right? Killing an animal to eat it makes sense, because you can't eat it without klling it. But causing pain and suffering beyond what's absolutely unavoidable (you're killing the animal so it is going to be in at least some distress for some time before it dies) is madness. Only maniacs enjoy watching another living being in suffering.
And I do believe that people who enjoy killing animals, for any reason, are broken somewhere in their heads. Taking a life is not something to be enjoyed.
> Killing an animal to eat it makes sense, because you can't eat it without klling it.
Just to think through the logic of that statement, let me also point out that killing an animal to mount its head on your wall makes sense, because you can't mount its head on your wall without killing it.
I think I agree with most of what you're saying, but we need to be careful not to hide implicit value judgements in our arguments like "Surely no reasonable person would want to hunt an animal for sport" or, conversely, "Surely no reasonable person would want to eat an animal for food (when there are so many delicious types of plant out there that provide nourishment just as well)".
You don't have to kill an animal to mount its head on a wall- you can wait for it to die. The reason people don't do that is because they want to display those heads as trophies.
I think there is an ocean of difference between killing an animal to feed on its flesh, and killing an animal purely for enjoyment, or for bragging rights. Feeding is necessary. Bragging about what a big hunter one is, is not.
Anyway I think there are many more people who think recreational hunting is crule than people who think meat is cruel.
That ocean doesn't seem very wide to me. If someone is eating an animal's flesh rather than plant-based food, presumably they are doing so "purely for enjoyment" of the taste of that flesh, especially if the animal flesh is more expensive.
I don't see why enjoyment of the taste of an animal is any better reason to kill it than enjoyment of the "sport" of hunting it or enjoyment of the bragging rights of having killed it. (To be clear, I'm saying that I think neither of those actions are inherently objectionable).
It should be possible to put these actions on one or the other side of a bright moral line, without reference to a specific society's opinion of how "cruel" those actions are, which I think in practice is heavily correlated with how much people have participated in those actions.
For example, if more people grew up hunting, then I'd expect that recreational hunting would not be regarded as cruel, and if more people grew up in a vegetarian society, I think that more people would think that eating meat is cruel. I suspect the latter would also change if more people were forced to work in a slaughterhouse for a few weeks.
I say in another comment that humans like to eat meat because meat is a very good food for humans. What we like and don't like to eat depends on our biology and is tuned to drive us to find the food we need to survive, and thrive. So I don't believe you can decouple enjoyment _of food_ from the needs of a biological body- and so you can't sensibly speak of "purely for enjoyment".
On the side, this biological drive to feed is of course tuned for a different era, before technological civilisation and it leads to excesses today, e.g. the over-consumption of sugar, and the over-consumption of meat, particularly in _some_ parts of the world (e.g. the Americas and Western Europe). I certainly agree with the adage "eat food, mostly plants, not too much". But "mostly plants" means "also some meat". A little meat, we do need to eat for a balanced diet and a healthy life.
In any case, the desire to kill an animal to show off one's hunting prowess is rather on a different level to biological needs. Nobody _needs_ to kill an animal for sport in order to stay alive. Everybody needs to eat. That is the ocean of difference I refer to in my comment.
I'm not convinced that if more people grew up hunting, they would accept recreational hunting more- I think the opposite would be the case. I believe that people in the developed world, today, are so far removed from the reality of raising and killing an animal to take its meat, that they have lost all sense of perspective on the matter. I believe that this distance from the act of killing has caused people to adopt extreme views, like veganism (though not necessarily vegeterianism, more broadly), or a complete indifference to the fate of animals. If more people had direct experience of hunting -or farming- and slaughtering animals, I believe we would see many fewer embracing these extreme views.
I don't think it's possible to decouple morality from the opinions of a specific culture. Morality is not a universal. For example, some human societies practiced cannibalism, even advanced societies like the Aztecs. There is a book that I love, "The true history of the conquest of new Spain", written by one of Hernan Cortez' conquistadores, Bernal Díaz del Castillo [1]. In the book, he describes the horror of the Spanish at the everyday cannibalism of human sacrifices by Aztecs and also the self-mutilating cult of the Aztecs' priests. People in different historical times have found very different things acceptable or unacceptable. We can't really hope to find "a bright moral line, without reference to a specific society's opinion" for anything from within the perspective of having been born and raised in a particular socieity, in a particular point in space and time.
Personally, I think that valuing all life as sacred is what comes closest to a true moral universal. This might surprise you, but my point is that valuing life means accepting the fact that life on Earth is made to consume other life to preserve itself. In order to survive, every living thing on the planet must eat some other living thing. Well, except for plants that do us all a big favour of underpinning the great food chain with their ability to feed directly on the rays of the sun. Everything else- we must eat each other; and plants. In any case, I believe also that valuing life above all else means that we should only take what we need. This means eliminating excesses like industrial food production and mass consumption, for instance, and certainly it means reducing the suffering of the animals we kill for food to what is absolutely unavoidable.
Hunting for sport is absolutely avoidable and I don't think it comes close to killing for food.
> "In any case, the desire to kill an animal to show off one's hunting prowess is rather on a different level to biological needs. Nobody _needs_ to kill an animal for sport in order to stay alive. Everybody needs to eat. That is the ocean of difference I refer to in my comment."
This is the disconnect I'm confused by.
Nobody _needs_ to eat meat to stay alive either. Plenty of people survive just fine without doing so (vegetarians and vegans).
It'd be different if we did need meat to live, but we don't.
My comment was "Everybody needs to eat". We need to eat food to stay alive and
meat is a very good kind of food. It doesn't have to be a choice of life and
death, eat meat or die. As an analogy, you also don't _need_ to wash to survive,
but it vastly improves your quality of life if you do.
As to vegetarians and vegans- while it's possible to maintain a healthy diet while being one or the other, it is much easier to do when eating some meat and animal products.
Fortunately I think there is a simple resolution to this question, in that torturing animals is heavily associated with (if not predictive or causative of) a tendency to harm humans too, and so it should be forbidden for that reason alone.
Similarly, it is justified to ban specifically hunting which leads to extinction of rare animals on the basis that the existence of these animals is part of the common cultural heritage of humanity and therefore no one has a right to prevent future generations from enjoying it.