Hunting: Good or Evil?

[TimRout]

I don't know if there's anything immoral about hunting, but it seems unnecessary to me.

I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you live in a big city. Am I wrong? Many people who live in Canada's far north (as I do) depend on game meat to feed their families. Wild game is far more economical than expensive store bought meats. Perhaps your comment is true in some contexts, but certainly not every context.

 

[dies-l]

I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you live in a big city. Am I wrong? Many people who live in Canada's far north (as I do) depend on game meat to feed their families. Wild game is far more economical than expensive store bought meats. Perhaps your comment is true in some contexts, but certainly not every context.

Personally, I am not a fan of hunting. As a moral issue, to answer the OP, I would say that it is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. If the Genesis account is taken at face value, there was no hunting prior to the fall, but that would be an incredibly weak basis for a moral argument in either direction.

I will say, however, that, where I live, hunters perform what could be seen as a social good. Where I live, there are no natural predators for the white-tail deer. As a result, we have major overpopulation, which results in traffic fatalities (deer/car collissions) and massive suffering for the animals that often die of starvation, due to lack of available food. Deer hunters (as annoying as they can be sometimes) help to thin the herd, improving the quality of life for the surviving animals and reducing the number of deer related traffic accidents. In that regard, hunting is probably a good thing.