I've heard people casually make the argument that human hunters function similarly to natural predators in terms of increasing population fitness -- but does that actually make sense?

A natural predator is incentivized to identify and go after a weak prey animal, b/c it's easier. Maybe this shifts the prey population to be a bit faster, or have sharper reflexes or something. But a modern human hunter may feel drawn to try to take the choicest specimen (e.g. a mature male deer with large antlers), and shoots from a distance, and a bullet moves too fast for the variance in reaction time or running speed of the animals to matter. Do human hunters using modern tech really select for fitness?

I do know that in fisheries around the world, when regulations said that only fish of a given species above a given size could be kept, fish got smaller. I.e. they were "fitter" in the sense of being more likely to be released by a human fisher, but not in the sense of having gained any advantage wrt the natural parts of their ecosystem. There are a lot of fishing competitions where the size of the largest fish trends down over time (and the records were set decades ago) not because individual competitors got worse at fishing, but because we selected against large fish.

I think the most plausible argument for human hunters being a net environmental good is just that in many places the fees associated with hunting licenses are a source of funds for actual conservation work.

What have those vegans done for animals? Just because they can’t stomach eating them doesn’t mean they actually “care” about animals enough to do something productive.

In the US, hunters have long spearheaded conservation efforts. Theodore Roosevelt said, over a hundred years ago:

> “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”

He a prolific hunter himself was responsible for significant expanding the national park system and founded the wildlife refuge system.

Meanwhile, humans have hunted countless species into extinction.

Yeah ok, but have the vegans done anything to help those species? Apart from not killing them I mean. Hunters, on the other hand, while yes, historically they may have technically sent some species extinct, they truly lead conservation efforts. Stupid hipster vegans need to pick up a gun and show that they actually care.

I cant tell if this is sarcasm or not... In case it isnt, the abstinence of eating meat has an abundance of easily verifiable conservation benefits which far outweigh not eating meat. That in itself shows that they care about species. I really hope it is sarcasm though...

The sarcasm is how I cope with some of the views in this thread.

Not to say that we haven't hunted some species to extinction, but the vast majority of how we kill them is habitat destruction through our expanding civilization. Both are factors, but hunting is by far not the primary one.

Why is "but we extinct more species through other activities" context of interest here? The discussion is about hunting.

Because very few species have been hunted to extinction. That’s directly contextual to the conversation.

Both are a travesty fwiw, but habitat destruction is easily 10x worse when it comes to endangering species.

>Both are a travesty fwiw, but habitat destruction is easily 10x worse when it comes to endangering species.

So you're saying that if we care about the animals, we should reduce our impact on the environment? For example, pick a diet that causes less greenhouse gas emissions? Ideally one that also results in significantly less harm to water, land and biodiversity? Makes sense.

Most of the habitat destruction is directly manmade, not indirectly through climate change. Way to put words in my mouth I never said, but no :)

Desertification due to unsustainable farming practice, deforestation for industrial farming (for vegetarian meals!), logging, and habitat clearing for homes and cities is the biggest contributor.

They’re literally cutting down or burning the Amazon in Brazil to keep livestock and to farm the land. They do it unsustainably and the soil is robbed of all nutrients. This results in most plants dying and desertification.

Want to see the best way to reverse this? Watch the (most fabulous) movie “the biggest little farm” where they turned a plot of land suffering from full desertification from monoculture farming into a small paradise teeming with life and diversity.

Also, to counter your point, it’s possible to add red seaweed to livestock feed which contains enough bromoform to counter around 80% of methane production. It does this by inhibiting the enzyme that creates the methane as a byproduct.

> I'd say hunters care a lot more about, and do more for, nature in their local ecosystem than your average city dwelling vegan hipster.

I don't think you've met many vegan hipsters, as while I can't claim to be either of those things I've known many, many of them and would pretty much universally disagree with you.

(Though a) I'm in UK which maybe makes a different compared to where you are, and b) anecdotes are of course not data, and the one thing we can say for sure is that within types of people such as "vegan" or "hunter" there are certainly going to be some who are absolute cunts, some who are practically angels, and everything in between. But despite only having anecdotes not data, I feel pretty confident in my anecdotal experience backing up the notion that the average vegan is generally going to care more about animals than the average non-vegan).