page_title: Hunting
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Hunting / Religion
caption_attribution_description: "Hunting of Blackbuck with Cheetah".
context_page_description: Hunting is the practice of seeking, pursuing and capturing or killing wild animals. Hunting wildlife or feral animals is most commonly done by humans for meat, recreation, to remove predators that can be dangerous to humans or domestic animals, to remove pests that destroy crops or kill livestock, or for trade. Many non-human species also hunt - see predation.
  Regulations distinguish lawful hunting from poaching, which involves the illegal killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species. The species that are hunted are referred to as game or prey and are usually mammals and birds. Economists classify hunting as part of primary production - alongside forestry, agriculture and fishing.
  Hunting by humans arose in Homo erectus or earlier, in the order of millions of years ago. Hunting has become deeply embedded in human culture.
  Hunting can be a means of pest control. Hunting advocates state that hunting can be a necessary component of modern wildlife management, for example, to help maintain a population of healthy animals within an environment's ecological carrying capacity when natural checks such as predators are absent or very rare.
context_section_description: Many prehistoric deities are depicted as predators or prey of humans, often in a zoomorphic form, perhaps alluding to the importance of hunting for most Palaeolithic cultures.
  In many pagan religions, specific rituals are conducted before or after a hunt; the rituals done may vary according to the species hunted or the season the hunt is taking place. Often a hunting ground, or the hunt for one or more species, was reserved or prohibited in the context of a temple cult.
caption: Mughal aristocrats hunting a blackbuck alongside an Asiatic cheetah, 1812
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