General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My family are hunters. I'd like to talk to you about hunting and what I know about hunting [View all]TygrBright
(20,763 posts)It's how life works.
Life is produced by life, sustained by life, increases and produces more life, sustains it and then through death may become part of more life.
Everyone must choose where and how they will be sustained by life-- what other forms of life, actual and potential, it is morally acceptable to consume, and under what conditions. That is one of our essential moral tasks as individuals. And throughout our lifetimes the choices and the perceptions of value and morality that drive them will inevitably evolve with us.
We will never be able to live outside the cycle of life-dying-to-enable-life. It doesn't work that way.
I believe that one of our essential moral tasks as a community, however, is to keep pushing our collective perceptions of value and morality in choices about being sustained by other life in the direction of awareness, empathy and caring for all life.
Hunting for food is no exception to the evaluation of choices and values in survival at the expense of other life. We have evolved standards of ethics that apply even in subsistence hunting.
In fact, subsistence hunters are some of those most keenly aware of balancing the needs of other species to survive with our own, just as subsistence farmers and gatherers sometimes make difficult choices about seed crops and propagation. So- hunt for food? I have no problems with that.
Balancing how we live to sustain the capacity of all life in sustaining each contributing form of life is a higher task than we've yet managed to grasp, but I believe we're evolving in that direction.
You want to take risks? You want to get close to large, magnificent predators? You want to polish your stalking skills?
TAKE A FUCKING CAMERA.
Even there- do it responsibly. Habitats are fragile.
sadly,
Bright