Is hunting animals a legitimate sport?

Yes

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by Ross Bagley

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Hunting is a recreation and is far more ethical than 99% of shrink-wrapped meat. As for the specific use of the word "sport", I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but since the possible uses of the word "sport" are as varied as the uses of the word "art", the decision to think of hunting as a sport or recreation or necessity or whatever is up to the individual hunter. Since the personal challenge of hunting can be quite substantial, in those cases, the use of the word "sport" is absolutely legitimate. Some variations on hunting, such as "canned hunts" where an animal is released from a cage and then shot in a wild setting push this label to its limit. I personally see nothing sporting or even interesting about that sort of a kill and strongly resist even calling it a hunt.

Most of the arguments in this debate are actually arguments against hunting at all, so the rest of my article will address these arguments, primarily from an ethics and health perspective. It is my assertion that hunting healthy wild animals for food is substantially more ethical than indiscriminately delegating the raising and killing of livestock, the way 99% of shoppers buy their meat. It is also marginally healthier, but not for the reasons normally mentioned.

When a hunter responsibly harvests a mature animal, we can tell a story that is quite congruent with the natural lives of all wild animals. A wild animal living in its natural environment: walking, running, playing, breeding, fighting, sleeping in nature, and then for a few seconds or minutes (or occasionally hours), the animal is in distress and pain before it dies. In the case of harvested game, the carcass will feed the hunter, the hunter's family, possibly his community. The more responsible the hunter, the shorter the period of distress. The ideal kill is a "drop" where the animal simply falls dead on the spot. One moment the animal is in a pastoral paradise, the way it has lived its whole life; the next moment, darkness and void.

Contrast that life with the life of a modern "grain-fed" cow. When a cow is taken from grass fields at the age of six months and introduced into the industrial production of supermarket meat, it is not treated well from that moment until it's death two years later. "Not treated well" is actually a significant lie of omission. Really, the cow is tortured for the rest of it's life and dies badly, frequently still conscious and panicked by the time it reaches the knives waiting to carve it into steaks, chops and roasts. Further, the industrial machine surrounding that cow is supremely wasteful of the resources used to grow the cow, including fresh water, antibiotics, and the expensively fixed nitrogen used to make the grain it eats. The manure and urine of cows, which in a pasture-raised cow, returns to the pasture and provides a breeding ground for the grubs that are the natural diet of chickens and other birds, is instead collected and often poorly isolated as a toxic waste, contaminated with the antibiotics required to keep closely-packed and malnutrited animals from contracting disease. This toxic sludge frequently seeps out into the environment, contaminating groundwater and doing even more damage in the name of neatly shrink-wrapped packages of meat. Even setting aside the waste and environmental cost of industrialized meat, the systematic mistreatment of the cattle in CAFOs should lead to all of them being shut down permanently.

Hunting is not ethically superior to well-managed pasture-raised cattle slaughtered in kosher slaughterhouses, but the quantity of meat that fits that description is so small and so expensive as to be essentially unavailable and uninteresting to most Americans.

The health benefits of wild game over industrialized meat are not as dramatic but are just as real. Since the fat content of the meat is the most important macronutrient for humans (consuming more than 35% of calories from protein is stressful to our kidneys and was carefully avoided by aboriginal groups that were mostly hunters: they sought the fattiest cuts and gave the lean meat to the dogs), the leaner meat of wild game is somewhat of a disadvantage. Since it is possible to keep and retain the abdominal fat during initial cleaning, render it into tallow and to consume it along with the meat later, this is usually not an significant downside. When we look deeper, into the micronutrients of the meat, a different story emerges. The variety of plants eaten by wild game are a much better source of Omega-3 fatty acids than simple grain, and as a result, the ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 is close to 1:1, a historical norm for both humans and wild animals. Grain fed cattle, on the other hand, because of the enormous quantity of Omega-6 fatty acids found in corn and wheat, typically have a ratio between 1:20 and 1:50.

Again, well-managed pasture-raised cattle do not share the micronutrient issues with CAFO-fattened cattle and can be just as healthy as wild game. With the variety of grasses and plants that they eat through their lives, pasture-raised cattle have a good to excellent balance of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids in their muscle and fat tissues.

I have repeated used the term "responsible hunter" to qualify a hunt as ethical, natural, beneficial or even sporting. A responsible hunter waits for a clean shot and chooses his shot so as to minimize the animal's suffering and to minimize the chances that any miss will result in a tragedy somewhere else. No upward shots (animals on ridgelines), instead shooting down into valleys and draws whenever possible such that any miss will be quickly embedded into dirt. A responsible hunter will also make sure that he does not leave a wounded animal, going to whatever means are necessary to end suffering quickly. It is my firm belief that responsible hunters are a substantial net positive for our culture and our natural resources and that maintaining a culture of responsible hunting will be essential to our health and our society's health as we continue to better understand ourselves and the world around us.

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