I'm torn...

[Drew]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071130/ap_ ... U5E7FH2ocA

[Count Zero]

I'm not really. As long as the meat isn't going to waste, the animal isn't being over hunted, then it is an okay thing.

Hunting and using the animal for food is something I have never had a problem with.

[Wintermute]

I think it's great, and seems a lot nicer to the animals than raising them in pens and pumping them full of antibiotics until they're trucked to a slaughterhouse.

[Dragonkin]

I have to admit, this is absolutely wonderful. That hunters are willing to give up a portion (or in some cases, the entirety) of their kill is heart-warming. It's one thing to share with your friends and family, but to share with people you may never meet is one of the things that (despite my over-whelming cynicism) gives me hope that the human race is still redeemable.

[Count Zero]

[quote="Wintermute"]I think it's great, and seems a lot nicer to the animals than raising them in pens and pumping them full of antibiotics until they're trucked to a slaughterhouse.[/quote]


I think we could find a spot somewhere inbetween that would be good.



A hunted animal dies much more painfully than a slaughtered animal. A lot of effort has gone into reducing the pain "food" animals suffer.

[Skyman]

I'm bummed...bambi ground beef

[Skyman]

So aside from good game meat getting ground up...I'm torn too

[Neuro]

[quote="Count Zero"]I think we could find a spot somewhere inbetween that would be good.



A hunted animal dies much more painfully than a slaughtered animal. A lot of effort has gone into reducing the pain "food" animals suffer.[/quote]

Holy Bullshit Batman! Have you ever visited a slaughterhouse?



Hunting Pro-tip: Don't miss.

[Count Zero]

[quote="Neuro"]Holy Bullshit Batman! Have you ever visited a slaughterhouse?



Hunting Pro-tip: Don't miss.[/quote]


My wife worked in one in college. They aren't pretty places, but killing something never is.



There have been lots of efforts to make slaughter humane. Some companies are doing it yet, but a number of companies are trying to make the death as painless as possible. Some are going to be better than others. It is certainly different than it was 20 years ago.

[Neuro]

They're also not humane places. The shocking may or may not help, in many cases it doesn't. The death isn't necessarily quick or clean and the lead-up to the process is stress-inducing for the animal.

When you (correctly) shoot an animal in the wild, it has no idea what's about to happen to it, five seconds ago everything was okay, so there's not the stress of the murder you find in slaughterhouses. I've never had anything live more than about fifteen seconds - if I don't think I've killed it the first time, I'll take a second or third shot to blow the brain out right from where I'm at so that I don't even waste time walking up to it.

[Count Zero]

[quote="Neuro"]They're also not humane places. The shocking may or may not help, in many cases it doesn't. The death isn't necessarily quick or clean and the lead-up to the process is stress-inducing for the animal.[/quote]


There have been really big pushes to deal with the stress put on the animal. They are changing the layout so the animal doesn't smell the blood and panic. Things like that. Yeah, slaughter is messy but there are very big efforts taking place to improve it.



As to hunting, your scenario assumes the hunter gets a good shot in. If the shot is off somehow then that is another story.



Of course both situations require optimum situations, which usually aren't always there.

[Dragonkin]

I have an idea . . . which is only partly in jest. Hire hunters to shoot cows/chickens/pigs/etc. in a free range environment.

Okay, I'll go sit in the You're A Jack@$$ chair, now.

[Illuman23]

I don't really understand why slaughterhouses have problems with fear, smell of blood, etc when the Jews have been killing humanely for thousands of years. You would think that the non-Kosher slaughterhouses would have picked up some tips/methods by now.


On US Meat production: I firmly believe that Americans are way too distanced from the realities of meat production. That slab of ground meat or steaks wrapped in plastic in no way resemble the actual cattle that it came from. I think that people shouldn't eat meat if they don't have the guts to kill the animal directly. (If I lived with this rule, I'd probably not eat pork anymore(too smart). I have no problems killing a chicken or fish, but I'd have to be pretty hungry in order to kill a cow.)


On Hunting: Ok Hunting is a really expensive sport. The licensing, equipment, etc can really bring the actual costs up significantly. As long as people aren't over-hunting an area, and only shoot legal game I think it's fine. Having the extra meat go to the food bank is awesome!

On Food: The US shouldn't have any problems feeding it's citizens, but we do. The US shouldn't have farming subsidies for Corn, Wheat, Tobacco, et al. How about subsidies for healthy food like fruit and vegatables? I'm sure that paying farmers to destroy or not grow crops made sense to congress (Can you say PORK?), but it sure doesn't make sense to me.

[Scolopendra]

[quote="Illuman23"]On US Meat production: I firmly believe that Americans are way too distanced from the realities of meat production.[/quote]
They're too distanced from most things, honestly. I agree on this point, but it may backfire: people have been culling cattle for meat for generations and one could argue that it's a distance from the industrialized meat production process that's allowed people to become... well, not "soft..." let's say "empathic" enough to turn vegetarianism and veganism into actual subcultures rather than an individual choice made by some particularly sensitive people. If people had to live around killing animals every so often, they wouldn't think twice. Take them away from that, though, and they start considering it alien that life feeds on life.


[quote]On Hunting: Ok Hunting is a really expensive sport. The licensing, equipment, etc can really bring the actual costs up significantly. As long as people aren't over-hunting an area, and only shoot legal game I think it's fine. Having the extra meat go to the food bank is awesome![/quote]
Agreed. I'm a crummy devil's advocate.


[quote]On Food: The US shouldn't have any problems feeding it's citizens, but we do. The US shouldn't have farming subsidies for Corn, Wheat, Tobacco, et al. How about subsidies for healthy food like fruit and vegatables? I'm sure that paying farmers to destroy or not grow crops made sense to congress (Can you say PORK?), but it sure doesn't make sense to me.[/quote]
Actually, this goes back to economics. Food production in the First World is intentionally limited so farmers can actually make a profit on their crops, and subsidies are a method to prevent farmers from overproducing themselves out of a livelihood. Problem: once farmers get used to handouts for fallow fields, they won't give them up. Additional problem: if farmers overproduce food, they and the starving get screwed because middlemen will dump overproduction to rot and generate artificial scarcity. This is all because foodstuffs are traded as commodities. Additional problem: if you instead treat foodstuffs as a collective utility, then that either brings up ineffective collectivization of farming (see the USSR, the PRC, NK), rationing (NK), or a subsidized commodity which generally suffers from bad quality because there's no impetus for anyone to make it any better (the USSR).



Feeding the nation's or the world's hungry is a really tricky problem, because it's not just a matter of balancing spreadsheets. There are major economic, logistic, and human hurdles to overcome as well.