Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?
Arguably hunters don't think in terms of single animals, unlike farmers, they care about the overall welfare of the ecosystem so that it may support sufficient number of animals to allow for hunting. I don't know how it works elsewhere, but I'd bet that Danish hunters do more to protect nature than any vegan or vegetarian organisation and they almost always work with nature preservation organisations.
I don't know what it's like where you are from, but in general I'd say hunters care a lot more about, and do more for, nature in their local ecosystem than your average city dwelling vegan hipster.
I don't think you've met many vegan hipsters, as while I can't claim to be either of those things I've known many, many of them and would pretty much universally disagree with you.
(Though a) I'm in UK which maybe makes a different compared to where you are, and b) anecdotes are of course not data, and the one thing we can say for sure is that within types of people such as "vegan" or "hunter" there are certainly going to be some who are absolute cunts, some who are practically angels, and everything in between. But despite only having anecdotes not data, I feel pretty confident in my anecdotal experience backing up the notion that the average vegan is generally going to care more about animals than the average non-vegan).
A natural predator is incentivized to identify and go after a weak prey animal, b/c it's easier. Maybe this shifts the prey population to be a bit faster, or have sharper reflexes or something. But a modern human hunter may feel drawn to try to take the choicest specimen (e.g. a mature male deer with large antlers), and shoots from a distance, and a bullet moves too fast for the variance in reaction time or running speed of the animals to matter. Do human hunters using modern tech really select for fitness?
I do know that in fisheries around the world, when regulations said that only fish of a given species above a given size could be kept, fish got smaller. I.e. they were "fitter" in the sense of being more likely to be released by a human fisher, but not in the sense of having gained any advantage wrt the natural parts of their ecosystem. There are a lot of fishing competitions where the size of the largest fish trends down over time (and the records were set decades ago) not because individual competitors got worse at fishing, but because we selected against large fish.
I think the most plausible argument for human hunters being a net environmental good is just that in many places the fees associated with hunting licenses are a source of funds for actual conservation work.
In the US, hunters have long spearheaded conservation efforts. Theodore Roosevelt said, over a hundred years ago:
> “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
He a prolific hunter himself was responsible for significant expanding the national park system and founded the wildlife refuge system.
Both are a travesty fwiw, but habitat destruction is easily 10x worse when it comes to endangering species.
So you're saying that if we care about the animals, we should reduce our impact on the environment? For example, pick a diet that causes less greenhouse gas emissions? Ideally one that also results in significantly less harm to water, land and biodiversity? Makes sense.
Desertification due to unsustainable farming practice, deforestation for industrial farming (for vegetarian meals!), logging, and habitat clearing for homes and cities is the biggest contributor.
They’re literally cutting down or burning the Amazon in Brazil to keep livestock and to farm the land. They do it unsustainably and the soil is robbed of all nutrients. This results in most plants dying and desertification.
Want to see the best way to reverse this? Watch the (most fabulous) movie “the biggest little farm” where they turned a plot of land suffering from full desertification from monoculture farming into a small paradise teeming with life and diversity.
Also, to counter your point, it’s possible to add red seaweed to livestock feed which contains enough bromoform to counter around 80% of methane production. It does this by inhibiting the enzyme that creates the methane as a byproduct.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/19/bird-killing-m...
Some strays used to stalk our bird feeder and I was finding dead goldfinches decapitated. Then we got an outdoor dog.
Not all hunters are conservationists but most are and laws and regulations are in place to protect animal species from over hunting (at least in Canada most of the US). Some conservation efforts are almost entirely run by hunters, for instance Duck's Unlimited has majority of its members as hunters.
There is certainly a place for hunting and there are certainly hunters who care deeply about ecology. I don’t see how it’s not a combination of fun and leisure though.