Hunters reduce suffering by sparing wild animals a worse death
Every animal dies once. A hunter does not spare a deer its death; he brings it forward by years. The trade is a few minutes of a worse death against years of life, and the people who eat the meat had a third option of killing nothing at all.
Death in the wild is rarely gentle: predators, starvation, disease and injury kill slowly and painfully. A skilled hunter who kills with a single clean shot, and eats what he kills instead of buying farmed meat, is causing far less suffering than either nature or the farm would. If the goal is less animal suffering, ethical hunting should count as part of the solution, not be lumped in with the problem.
A quick shot is very likely less painful than being brought down by wolves or dying slowly of starvation or disease. That difference is real. Hunting is also clearly less harmful than raising animals in confinement, and a hunter who avoids farmed meat for that reason has a point.
But the argument compares the wrong things. The hunted animal was not about to die in a predator's jaws that afternoon. It might have lived another five or six years and then died, perhaps badly, perhaps not. What the hunter removes is a few minutes of a possibly worse death. What he takes is everything between now and then. Most people would not accept that trade for a dog or a person, and the argument gives no reason why it is acceptable here.
The practice also does not fit the stated motive. If sparing suffering were the aim, hunters would seek out the injured, the sick and the old. In practice they mostly take healthy animals in their prime, often males, chosen for size or antlers. In some regions game populations are deliberately kept high, through winter feeding or feeders, so that there is more to hunt. That is not a mercy programme.
Not every shot is clean either. Wounded animals that escape and die later are a known part of hunting, so the clean death is the good case rather than the guaranteed one.
Finally, the hunter's friend is still eating the animal. For someone with access to plant foods, the choice is not between a bullet and a wolf. It is between a killing and none. A gentler way of killing something unnecessarily reduces the harm. It does not make it necessary.
- Vegans should accept hunting, because hunters are allies against needless suffering
Different wording, same argument. The response above answers all of them.
Presenting two options as though they were the only ones available when further options exist. Also called a false dichotomy, or black-and-white thinking.
How it applies here: The argument presents the choice as a hunter's quick shot versus a predator's slow kill, as though the animal faced one or the other now. It leaves out the obvious third outcome: the animal living for years more before dying, which is what hunting actually takes away.