I did not appreciate life as a young person. It is only in recent years that I am absolutely enthralled by the beauty of life. Seeing how complex life is, it is surprising that it even exists. I sometimes question my own motivations about how I frivolously I have lived my life without paying much attention to suffering in the lives of other living beings. I also feel powerless in front of the huge economic forces that I have to come to depend on for my sustenance. I wish we were better equipped to comprehend the suffering in another life. I know it only when I am told explicitly. I see all the painful ways we hunt and find it extremely painful. And much of civilization thinks of hunting as a sport. Causing pain to another species is sport!
I think you'd be surprised how many hunters appreciate the beauty and fragility of nature to a much higher degree than the average person. Who else sits in the woods for hours and hours and studies the patterns of animals and weather? There are some dumbasses who just like shooting guns, but a lot of hunters are also conservationists.
I guess that depends on the person and on the country, but system is certainly broken at least in some countries. For exmample in my country hunter's organisation is something like NRA - it's the only easy way to have access to weapons, and a lot of people participate just to shoot. They treat state forests as farms - feeding animals so there's overpopulation and then they can shoot them using the excuse that there's too many...
Sure hunters can be conservationists; losing nature means losing their source of entertainment. But that doesn't mean they appreciate nature and it certainly doesn't mean they respect individuals, which they obviously do not.
I think conservationsist is meant in a sense that they respect and appreciate nature. Every hunter I've come across was conversationist (in a sense that they appreciate nature), but I am biased because a lot I've come across were through national parks. But there are certainly a lot of conservationist hunters.
I think your second sentence is not well formulated because if one does not follow you line of thought it does not make sense (X does not do Y because it obviously does not do Y). It's probalbly a risky subject, it might be that you just want to avoid too intense internet-arguments with that phrasing.
>I think conservationsist is meant in a sense that they respect and appreciate nature.
These kinds of conversations inevitably involve either special pleading or completely distorted definitions of words like "respect" that we would not accept in any other context.
>I think your second sentence is not well formulated because if one does not follow you line of thought it does not make sense [...]
I honestly have no idea what you're trying to communicate here. Do you want to try again?
> These kinds of conversations inevitably involve either special pleading or completely distorted definitions of words like "respect" that we would not accept in any other context.
And I think this is a bit condescending. You're essentially denying me to have a different opinion because it's just invalid in your point of view. To give you perspective: I am not a hunter, I am a vegetarian and have been very active in environmental protection. I am certainly not advocating for myself or feel the need to defend my actions by special pleading or completely distorted definitions. But I see that hunters fullfill an important role because we don't really have much wild nature here in germany anymore and for most parts it's not possible because there's not enough space and the developed nature is not robust enough. Enviromentalist organisations here often work quite closely with hunters. And I also see that hunters exist that respect and appreciate nature (not because they want to hunt), which you seem to deny.
> I honestly have no idea what you're trying to communicate here. Do you want to try again?
"But that doesn't mean they appreciate nature and it certainly doesn't mean they respect individuals, which they obviously do not." Does not make sense to me because "certainly doesn't mean they respect individuals, which they obviously do not." does not. You say "X does not do Y because it obviously does not do Y." where X is the hunter and Y is respecting individuals. You treat it as given but for me it's not. What I wanted to say is that your sentence only makes sense when one shares your line of thought (it's obvious then), but when one does not then it's a not an argument (it is so because it is so). You treat it as a fact. In spirit it's similiar to my reply above.
We're not talking about differences in opinion here. We're talking about abuse of language. You cannot respect an individual and kill them for entertainment. If you think otherwise, you're using a completely different definition of the word 'respect' and it's certainly not the definition that would be used in any other context. Hunters can be conservationists. They can even be a net positive for nature overall. But they kill other individuals. For enjoyment. Unnecessarily. They don't respect them. And I say this is obvious because it's a simple syllogism.
Pretending that there is some sort of subjectivity to this discussion is disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. You keep trying to shift this back to opinions and points of view, which I find is a common tactic when discussing animals, but we're not talking about anything subjective.
> Pretending that there is some sort of subjectivity to this discussion is disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. You keep trying to shift this back to opinions and points of view, which I find is a common tactic when discussing animals, but we're not talking about anything subjective.
Well, I think this answer is even more condescending. A discussion from here is not possible since you entirely deny every other opinion on the topic and assert yourself the objective truth. You ignore the various aspects of the problem, for example professional hunters. A quick search reveals philosophers discussion the question and coming to different or complex answers that depend on various factors (most importantly: why does the hunter hunt?), so I can't be the only one not buying into your line of thought. I originally was honestly interested in you opinion, but it seems there's no depth to it. You can't even defend it, you're just reinforcing that you're right.
EDIT: since there's another answer in a similiar spirit there's at least one other opinion that rejects or doubts your statement.
EDIT2: An interesting example to reinforce my arguments is that the statement "women, who have abortions, don't respect human live, because they obviously do not" is seen as trivial by some but rejected by others. These things do not live in a mathmatical world where axioms are stated, agreed and theorems derived using proofs and pure logic. So one talking about those topics can never assert the obvious truth to his statements. There are no right or wrongs in philosophy and ethics (in a mathmatical sense), just statements the people agree on.
You can keep calling me condescending, but that's not an argument. If you have a definition of "respect" that includes unnecessary killing, great. Provide that definition and then tell me that you use the same definition for ones treatment of humans. If not, you're guilty of special pleading. If you have citations of philosophers who make an argument that you can hunt an individual for sport while respecting them, I'd love to see them.
If you want to express a difference in opinion, do so. You keep repeating that you don't like my statements and there are other opinions, but you have not yet been able to articulate what that different opinion is and how it applies to the conversation.
Hunting and deriving enjoyment from it does not mean you can't have respect for the individual animal. Obviously there are sociopathic people out there who kill animals (and other people) without respect but you are arguing that there isn't an alternative. I would argue that hunters that respect animals vastly outnumber the hunters that don't.
Unless you have zero capacity for empathy, it is impossible to not have a massive respect for life when you take direct responsibility for death. Every aspect of our mass produced lives causes death. Unless you are 100% off grid, everything you consume from the vegetables and meat you eat to the clothes on your back are the products of death. Hunting forces you to take direct responsibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this aspect was what you took offence to, but it was the idea of enjoyment. I was raised as deer hunter and cried after my first kill. I challenge you to ask any lifelong deer hunter what they enjoy about hunting. Sure, they enjoy finding a big one but none of them find enjoyment in seeing an animal suffer or in the act of killing alone. They become better marksmen so they can kill as quickly and painlessly as possible and they eat what they kill. They enjoy the craft of marksmanship, tracking animals, and land management. They enjoy being alone in the woods all day doing nothing but watching and listening to wildlife. And they enjoy having visceral connection to nature, our past, and what we consume.
I'm not asking you to agree with any of this. I only ask you to try to see that there are other perspectives outside of your bubble and to not flippantly dismiss discussion about them as 'disingenuous and intellectually dishonest.'
>Hunting and deriving enjoyment from it does not mean you can't have respect for the individual animal.
I'll ask you the same thing I've been asking the other commenter. What is your definition of respect that includes the unnecessary killing for sport and will you apply that same definition to humans? I haven't made any arguments about sociopathy, which is a straw man. You went down a long rabbit hole about what hunters enjoy about hunting. None of that is new information to me and none of it is relevant to my point. I'm simply pointing out that any definition of respect that I've come across would not include the unnecessary killing of someone. Whether you enjoy the act of killing and whether you enjoy other aspects of hunting make no difference to the 3 relevant premises:
1. Hunting for sport is unnecessary.
2. Respect for an individual requires not killing them unnecessarily.
Tell me which one of those statements you disagree with. And again, if it's the latter, you can't apply that specifically to prey animals without that being fallacious. We're all completely talking past each other; neither of you have pointed out any issues or disagreement with my reasoning, just that you don't like the outcome as expressed.
At the risk of sounding new-age.. I think man really is full of himself. We think of nature as something simple and marvel at our creations but if you look at it with slightly cold eye, you'll see how everything is complex, subtle, and full of beauty. Wood fiber, feathers, even plants. It's highly intricate weaving of threads giving structure, color, function .. it's not that different from pieces of electronics to me.
For anyone who wants a concrete experiment to challenge your ideas of just how complex nature is, try making a cell. Just one cell. From scratch with nothing but ions and proteins. If you find that to be achievable (there's likely a Nobel prize in it for you), try making one that divides. Now imagine that somehow an elephant can be encoded in the ions/proteins of just two cells. Humanity has never built anything that even comes close to such complexity. And then to imagine that ecosystems operate on the complex interactions between these immensely complex organisms.
Just because I’m not a skilled enough developer to code Linux from scratch doesn’t mean I can’t make a patch for it.
Also doesn’t guarantee that I won’t generate unintended consequences
Point being - you don’t have to be capable of making the whole to make modifications. (But in any complex system, there are likely to be unintended consequences)
A good example would be immune modulation for cancer therapy - ipilimumab and it’s ilk are miracle workers for many, however because of the complexity of the immune system in a proportion of patients there is a cascade of multi organ failure kicked off by the treatment
You can make concrete changes now. Vote with your dollar. Do not support industries that flippantly disregard the beauty and sanctity of life in its many forms.
It's an important start, but sometimes it just feels like it's not enough, especially if people have certain beliefs that they hang onto without being able to defend them, for fear of a slippery slope situation.
Take for example smoking. It's absolutely disgusting how they just throw their cigarette butts on the ground when they're done with them. So, not only is it a harmful activity to engage in for the individual at hand, it also harms people nearby, as well as the environment as the trash they leave behind is not biodegradable. No idea what can be done about this.
