The ethical hunter: How to consume animal life

Hunting is more than just killing animals. Modern man also intentionally ends animal lives during industrial agriculture and may have to end pet animal lives when pets grow too old or are suffering. Both of these modes of consumption are different than the death man inflicts at the end of a successful hunt and different than the death a wild animal would face without the hunter entering the field. Pet and food animals are killed by someone whose job is killing animals with no emotional attachment, maximum speed and efficiency. Hunters go into the wild to seek out an emotional attachment to the osen animal or a heightened emotional state before attempting to kill the animal. Hunting is ultimately intentional, conscious animal killing that may include subjecting an individual animal to exceptional pain and suffering only for human recreation. Such a practice cannot be consistent with current societal values. Recognizing this challenge, how to justify the only recreational killing and possible animal cruelty that is at least temporarily tolerated in modern times, hunters offer a broad and diverse series of justifications that each fail individually.;The solution to these shortcomings will take the form of the Ethical Hunter, the hunter who takes the field to hunt recreationally and begins by following all relevant legal constraints before augmenting them to account for why and how the wild animal is killed with an eye towards reducing pain and suffering. The Ethical Hunter works from Fair Chase trying to make the killing part of hunting as much like slaughter in industrial agriculture without changing the certainty of animal encounter. So there is a chance to fail to see animals, but if animals are seen, they are killed quickly and with minimal pain. The Ethical Hunter begins this control by choosing the best possible weapon, a high-powered centerfire rifle with an optical sight, deployed under the best possible circumstances with the best possible preparation. The Ethical Hunter makes his shot in the field as close his practice at the range, shooting from a stable rest with a known range at a stationary target. This target will be a wild animal that the Ethical Hunter will consume completely, being defined by how agricultural uses carcasses. The Ethical Hunter has created a paradigm that resembles consumption of animal life in industrial agriculture, but that may be even more ethically justified. Assume that living in 2013 requires some loss of animal life, even with a vegetarian lifestyle. Care must be taken to avoid implicit speciesism valuing charismatic megafauna over all other animal species. If an animal life is worth an animal life, ethical hunting yields more calories per life consumed compared to industrially produced beef. The Ethical Hunter, when hunting locally, traveling minimally processing his own meat requires less resources per pound of animal produced compared to modern industrial agriculture including reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. The wild animal is leading a better life compared to the domesticated animal in the industrial agriculture paradigm because of the wild animal is allowed to live without human constraint or conscious investment. The animals raised in free range farming operations more closely resemble the ethically hunted wild animal, but not completely. If the Ethical Hunter can follow his set protocol accounting for animal pain and suffering, the animal killed at the end of the hunt will have lived a better life and no worse death than the animals consumed by agriculture.;In this formulation, the Ethical Hunter attempts to work through hunting being only about killing to a consumption of animal life that is more consistent with a modern view of animal life. The wild animal killed at the end of the ethical hunt is pure in terms of antibiotics, vaccines and preservatives, an increasingly valued quality of food for many people. The wild animal death is no worse than what animals face in industrial agriculture and may be better in terms of stress of transport and life up to that point which is consistent with the societal concern for quality of animal life. Finally, the hunt connects the hunter to a simpler time of self-sufficiency and to the significance of death, which cannot be the primary motivator but may be a collateral benefit consistent with experiences people are seeking out in modern life. Through this examination, the Ethical Hunter should appear less an antiquated ideal of evil and brutality and more like the most justified consumption of animal life, a collection of searching, connection, awareness, and minimized environmental impact not justified because of any one of these reasons, but because of how all of them make ethical hunting superior to current alternatives. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).