Recreational Hunting

Round 3: RebuttalsI apologize for the late response, as school has required a large amount of my attention. With that aside, lets move on to the rebuttals. MoralityI thank my opponent for recognizing that animals are rarely shot in the wild for food anymore, and more often are shot by recreational hunters. However, I find that the argument that shooting an animal to prove ones personal skills and independence is moral to be highly impractical. I find that there is nothing moral in shooting a defenseless creature with a gun from one hundred yards away. Independence is not a valid reason for murder. If I were to commit murder against a fellow human being, could that be justified by me saying that I wanted to see if I had the ability to kill another. Absolutely not, and if you do believe that this is justified then I believe that you might be slightly psychotic. I understand that murdering a fellow human being is not exactly the same as killing a deer in the woods, but the basic principal remains intact. Murder for the purpose of proving ones sovereignty and skill cannot be justified in any regard. Environmental ImpactThe flaw with my opponents argument is that the majority of invasive species are not mammals, but rather are plants. These plants (i.e. Purple Loosetrife) are infamous for reproducing rapidly and therefore crowding out the majority of the other plants in an ecosystem. This greatly harms said ecosystem because once these plants are essentially driven out by the invasive species, the primary consumers which feed upon these plants run out of their food source and therefore die out. This is why species introductions account for 39% of animal extinctions since 1600. Unless my opponent proposes that hunters go out and shoot at the invasive plants, which I would heavily endorse, then my opponents argument is invalid. My opponent also points out that hunting can sometimes be beneficial to an ecosystem as a whole, because it can limit the success of an overly-dominant species. However, if we turn back to the classic wolf and deer relationship, I can show how this is not always a successful path. When colonists first arrived in American in the 17th century, they discovered that their was a huge and thriving population of Gray Wolves. Afraid that the wolves would kill both their livestock and their children, the colonists sought to eradicate the Gray Wolf population by hunting them. The colonists, and eventually the Americans, were so successful that they nearly succeeded in their original goal of eradicating the Gray Wolf, and by 1960 the Gray Wolf population in the contiguous US had dropped to just 300 [1]. This, however, proved to have a negative influence on the biosphere as a whole. With such a small population of wolves, deer thrived and their populations boomed. This had an extremely negative effect on the plants, as the huge deer population resulted in overgrazing. This caused there to be a huge drop in food sources for a huge number of animals and their populations consequently plummeted as well. Once the Americans realized that they had made a huge mistake by killing off all the wolves, they began to try and help the wolf population re grow. One perfect example of this would be at Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone, the ecosystem had been suffering greatly because the deer had overgrazed the parks plants. Therefore the National Park Service decided to reintroduce the wolf population in 1993 [2]. Graph C shows the population of deer in Yellowstone.Graph C: It is clear that the deer population had been prospering after the wolves had been eradicated, however when wolves were reintroduced the population began to decrease nearly instantly. This example shows how hunting a dominant animal in an ecosystem will inevitably have repercussions due to the fact that every single creature in said ecosystem impacts each other in one way or another. ConclusionI have shown that their is both no legitimate way to justify the shooting of another animal for recreation and that hunting will not always prove to be beneficial to an ecosystem, and most often will prove to be a negative effect. Sources [1] http://www.missionwolf.org...[2] http://www.nps.gov...