Recreational Hunting

It has been an extremely fun and also informational debate. Now on to the final rebuttals. Morality and IndependenceI feel that I must have misunderstood my opponents original rebuttal. Rather than saying that people are killing animals solely for the sake of seeing if they could do it, my opponent claims that people hunt down animals for the sake of feeding themselves as opposed to buying their own food. This argument makes much more sense, however I still find it impractical. It is legitimate to say that murder for the sake of feeding yourself is justified. However, the only problem with this point is that the majority of hunters are not hunting for the sake of feeding themselves, but rather are hunting for the sake of recreation. As for the sports argument I see that there are two very different things between killing another man/woman and simply fighting or wrestling with him/her. Also, I disagree with the claim that these sports are being played with the sole intention of demonstrating superiority. It might be true that this is how some or even most of these sports originated from, however now people participate in such events so as to simply play the sport itself. In a way, I find this similar to the case of recreational hunting, as the hunters have lost their original intentions of killing for the sake of providing food and now simply kill for the sake of recreation. Moving on to the next argument, I once again agree with my opponent that it is reasonable to shoot a duck or deer or any other wild animal if you have the sole intention of providing food for yourself. However, due to the fact that hunters no longer both need or want to shoot animals for their meat, the argument that hunting is more moral than slaughterhouses is faulty. I would also like to remind my opponent that this debate is about the topic of recreational hunting, which defined in round one as "Chasing and killing wild animals for one's enjoyment". This argument is leading in to the realm of hunting for neccesity rather than hunting for recreation. Finally, for the final argument about the pain of the animal. My opponent suggests that since the hunter has no intention of harming the animal, therefore it is perfectly OK for them to shoot it even if it brings great pain to the animal in question. Allowing an animal to survive through an extremely painful wound in the wild is the very definition of immorality, and it would be much better for the hunter to simply kill the animal rather than let it suffer its fate in the wilderness. My opponent also dropped my argument about how hunting creates starvation, which is another point that shows how hunting is generally immoral. Invasive SpeciesI understand my opponents argument that not all invasive species are plants, and that there are actually a great many of them which are animals. However the vast majority of invasive species are indeed plants, and the plants are what cause the vast majority of the number of extinctions caused by invasive species [1]. The reason for this is because the plants crowd out the other plants and therefore cut off the food source for all of the species that rely on those plants. Animal Invasive Species may be a nuisance, but they do not cause species extinctions at such a high level or at all. Graph D shows the vast disparity between the number of invasive plants and animals (while admittedly in Denmark, but still shows my point). Graph D: On to the point about the deer vs. wolf scenario. I do acknowledge that the original purpose for hunting wolves was not for recreational purposes, however it eventually did evolve into a sport as opposed to neccesity. This can be seen in that the price of wolf fur doubled from 1830 and 1850 from $1 to $2 [2]. This shows that now people were hunting wolves for their furs and not to protect livestock. Concluding Statement I feel that I have provided sufficient arguments for why hunting is both immoral and bad for the environment. I appreciate my opponents point about how hunting for the sake of providing food is not necissarily immoral, and in fact agree with him. However, given that this debate is centered around recreational hunting and not necesital hunting, I feel that this argument does not refute my original arguments. I would also like to thank my opponent for a civil debate about this matter. While I do not think that my opinion on the matter of recreational hunting has changed, I do feel that my opponent convinced me of the fact that hunting for food is not always bad and I would like to thank him for that. Sources [1] . http://www2.mst.dk... [2] . http://en.wikipedia.org...