Should hunting be against the law?

Answer 1

First off, it would help to know what you are referring to: do you mean hunting animals in general, or hunting of game/trophy/pest animals, or hunting of a specific animal species?

I'll try to answer the general question here: should humans hunt animals? I'll restrict the answer to exclude fishing (which, technically, is a form of hunting) and whaling.

Those against hunting point out several problems that they feel make hunting wrong:

1. Hunting is damaging to the animal species in question, because humans are both super-predators (we don't hunt for food, we hunt for enjoyment) and are generally very poor at managing their take. That is, even with government regulation, human hunting very often is far in excess of a "sustainable" amount, and regulations/quotas are often very slow to account for changing conditions. Thus, human hunting can rapidly decimate an animal population, even if that is not the intention.
2. As humans do not need to hunt for food, hunting is done for pleasure. A sport which causes severe pain and death is immoral, and we should not encourage/allow such activities.
3. Hunting in much of the world makes for ready access to firearms, which are problematic for many societies. That is, by making firearms legal and readily available for use in hunting, there are many bad side-effects from having such weapons in society.
4. Similarly, weapons used in hunting are generally not well-regulated, and often make hunting nothing like a sport and closer to a slaughterhouse.
5. Population control arguments for hunting are often specious, as if we allowed for proper predator populations, humans would not need to hunt. For example, deer are prey for wolves and puma, both of which humans have also hunted. If the wolf and puma hunting was disallowed, their populations would increase to one able to control the deer population.

Those in favor of hunting tend to make the following arguments:

1. Until societies are willing to accept predators back into the ecosystem (and their attendant collateral damage to livestock and pets), many animal species have no population check other than food supply. Hunting allows for proper population control, without mass starvation.
2. Hunting is a pass time older than the human race, and an important part of our racial culture. It provides a valuable learning experience for younger generations to be taught about nature and proper balance. With proper precautions, it can be done safely and humanely.
3. Hunting is generally the fastest and most efficient way to control pest animal populations, and much less damaging to the environment than options such as toxic poisons or pesticides, and far more practical than traps.
4. For a certain subset of the population, hunting does provide an important supplementary food source.
5. Hunting creates considerable economic activity, generating significant revenue (via licensing) for environmental management programs that would not otherwise have these monies.

NO, without hunting animals would be overpopulated, like where i live they stopped hunting cougars with dogs and the cougars started to move into town because they are very territorial and there was way to many cougars for the mountains, this created a dangerous environment for the animals and the people