A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore
The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:
We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.
It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.
An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.
I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.
Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”
As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species
As a vegan, let me just say:
If more vegans just focused ALL of their energy strictly on factory farming, it would be far more effective and they would not hurt their cause more than they help it.
Factory farming is where an overwhelming majority of unnecessary animal cruelty takes place, and there is incredibly substantive evidence that supports that claim.
There is so much abuse that occurs at factory farms that vegans could entirely focus on that and they would accomplish far more in actually ending the abuse that goes on there, and get far less pushback from other progressive groups.
Most other groups that end up fighting with vegans ALSO usually hate factory farms too, and hate how the animals are treated there. I know for a fact this applies to Indigenous people especially.
Going to also add:
Someone pointed this out in the comments, and I agree: there are a lot of hunters who are unethical. Sport hunting is always wrong, for example.
I will add to this that there is a significant difference between the way a lot of white settlers hunt and the way Indigenous people hunt.
Indigenous hunting is its own method of hunting that has been practiced for generations going back thousands of years in many cases, and it is a system that ensures that the ecosystem remains healthy.
A lot of white settler hunting is based on sport hunting, by contrast. If we are concerned about hunting practices, we should primarily be confronting white settler hunting practices specifically.
