RE: Hunting

From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 08:35:27 MDT

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    On Mon, 5 May 2003, gts wrote:

    > Yes, to quote Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but
    > thinking makes it so."
    >
    > The prey is going to suffer whether you are hunting for own desperate
    > survival, or purely for the sport of killing things. So then I think you'll
    > have to agree that the suffering of animals is not what makes sport-hunting
    > evil, if indeed sport-hunting is evil.

    The prey is not going to suffer from human hunting (pain, fear, loss of
    life, social disruption, etc.) if humans do not hunt. It may be that the
    suffering an individual animal encounters in Nature may turn out to be
    just as bad, or worse, but it is not necessarily so. And either way,
    humans are responsible for what humans do. Like Rafal, you are backing
    toward an absurdum like 'since everyone is going to die anyway, let's just
    kill one another'.

    > If sport-hunting is evil then it must be because the neurons in the hunter's
    > brain are discharging in a certain pattern.

    I wouldn't think *hunters* believe hunting is evil. They think it is good,
    for a variety of reasons that make sense in their minds. We don't have to
    reduce this to discharging neurons, since the reasons are explicable. Just
    like the reasons of those who prefer to appreciate wild animals instead of
    hunt them.

    gej
    resourcesoftheworld.org
    jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu



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