Hunting

Hunting

The hunting debate

Most debate in the UK about hunting concerns hunting with dogs.

Hunting facts

Hunting has been a major sport in the UK. The facts below are taken from the Burns Report into Hunting with Dogs (2000):

Foxes

There are about 200 registered packs of hounds in England and Wales which are estimated to kill some 21,000-25,000 foxes a year. Many more foxes are dug out and shot or are killed by people using lurchers or other 'long dogs'.

Deer

There are three registered staghound packs in the Devon and Somerset area. They kill about 160 red deer a year in total, excluding injured deer which they dispatch.

Hares

There are about a hundred registered packs of hounds (beagles, bassets and harriers) which hunt hares. They kill about 1,650 hares a season. There are some 24 registered hare coursing clubs, which kill about 250 hares a year in total.

Mink

The 20 minkhound packs kill somewhere between 400 - 1,400 mink a season.

Hunting in the UK: the Hunting Act

Under the terms of the new Hunting Act, which covers England and Wales, a person "commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog, unless his hunting is exempt."

Exempt hunting is defined as stalking or flushing out an animal, using no more than two dogs, with a view to shooting the mammal as soon as it breaks cover.

The hunting can only take place on land owned by the hunter, or on land owned by someone who has given permission for the activity and it can only be carried out with a view to protecting property or livestock.

The Bill also outlaws hare coursing. People will still be allowed to use dogs to catch rats and rabbits.

This legislation was passed against great opposition and organisations that support hunting plan to continue their fight through the courts.

Cases for and against

The case against hunting with dogs

According to some of the external submissions made to the Burns Committee Report, 2000, hunting with dogs 'seriously compromises the welfare' of foxes, hares and mink. The Report also states that 'most scientists agree that deer are likely to suffer in the final stages of hunting'. It should be noted that other equally compelling evidence was also submitted to the enquiry that opposes these views.

The case against hunting with dogs usually includes most of these points:

• animals are often killed painfully
• animals suffer pain and fear during the chase
• animals that escape may be injured
• hunting involves unnecessary cruelty, as animal population control can be better done in other ways
• the animals hunted in Britain are not significant agricultural pests
• the basic interests of the hunted animals are seriously violated in order to satisfy less basic human interests
  • the animal interest is the basic one of continuing to live
  • the trivial human interests are sport, pleasure and the preservation of cultural traditions
  • the serious human interests are the protection of agriculture, the conservation of the environment and the provision of human employment
• it is morally wrong to kill for pleasure

The moral case for hunting

The case that hunting with dogs is not ethically wrong usually includes some of these points:

• being hunted by other animals is a natural part of the life of wild animals
  • Opponents argue: Some animals hunted in the UK have no natural predators here, and so have no natural experience of the chase
• hunting with dogs provides a very quick death - quicker and more painless than the death that many animals would otherwise get
• animals are not left injured - they either escape or are killed
• hunting is necessary to protect agriculture and the environment from animal pests or overpopulation
• hunting is as humane, or more humane, than other methods of controlling wild animal populations

Non-moral arguments include these points:

• hunting provides human employment
• hunting preserves Britain's cultural traditions
• hunting provides sport and pleasure to many people

Useful link: Final Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Hunting (UK 2000)

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

Hunting and the environment

Hunting and environmental ethics

Animal ethics and environmental ethics sometimes clash.

The animal rights position on hunting seems to be very clear. It is morally wrong to hunt and kill animals.

But hunting may be a good thing for the environment:

• Hunting may be necessary to preserve the health or integrity of an ecosystem by controlling animal populations
• Animal rights endanger biodiversity, because they prevent breeding endangered species in captivity
• Animal rights prevent the reintroduction of locally extinct predators to restore an ecosystem
• A ban on hunting prevents human beings hunting down animal predators even to protect prey animals

A new starting point

Instead of starting from the standpoint that hunting animals is always wrong, it's possible to start from the rather weaker standpoint that there is a presumption against hunting.

Categories of hunting

Gary E. Varner suggests in his book In Nature's Interests? Interests, Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics that it would be useful to subdivide hunting into three types according to the purpose that it serves:

• Therapeutic hunting: Hunting 'designed to secure the aggregate welfare of the target species, the integrity of its ecosystem, or both'
  • i.e. hunting that is biologically necessary to prevent overpopulation or damage to other animals, plants or elements of the environment
• Subsistence hunting: Hunting 'aimed at securing food for human beings'
• Sport hunting: Hunting 'aimed at maintaining religious or cultural traditions, at re-enacting national or evolutionary history, at practicing certain skills, or just at securing a trophy'

Therapeutic hunting either benefits the group of animals whose members are being hunted, or produces other important environmental benefits.

Subsistence and sport hunting only benefit human beings.

Any particular example of hunting may involve a combination of two or more of the three types of hunting.

Therapeutic hunting

Therapeutic hunting is justifiable

Therapeutic hunting can be justified on ethical as well as environmental grounds.

Subsistence and sport hunting can't - but providing the hunt is carried out in the kindest way to the animal being hunted, justification of a hunt as therapeutic is not nullified by it also being for sport or subsistence.

Therapeutic hunting is easy to defend from a consequentialist viewpoint (one that decides right and wrong by looking at the results of an action), as Gary Varner demonstrates:

• We have a moral obligation to minimise pain.
• In the case of 'obligatory management species', more pain would be caused by letting nature take its course than by conducting carefully regulated therapeutic hunts
  • An 'obligatory management species' is one that has a fairly regular tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of its range, to the detriment of its own future generations and those of other species
• Therefore, we are morally obligated to conduct carefully regulated therapeutic hunts of obligatory management species rather than let nature take its course

But note that if an equally effective alternative that didn't involve killing existed (perhaps a form of animal contraception), that would invalidate this particular justification of hunting, and require us to use that alternative method instead.

Therapeutic hunting methods

Hunting, if justified, must also be carried out so as to minimise pain and suffering.

This means using whatever method causes the least distress to the animal concerned. This may not be the method preferred by those who hunt for sport.

A hunt justified on therapeutic grounds becomes morally wrong if it is carried out in an unnecessarily harmful way.

Protection against predators

Protecting animals against predators

If animals have rights, including the right not to be hunted, do human beings have a moral duty to protect them from natural predators?

This is hardly a practical question, since it would be impossible for human beings to do this, but it raises the difficult question of the connection between rights and obligations.

Fortunately, some philosophers have come up with a complicated argument to show that animals hunted by other animals don't have their rights violated:

• Only moral agents can do right or wrong, or violate another being's rights
• Moral agents are beings that can recognise right or wrong and alter their behaviour accordingly
• Non-human animals are not moral agents
  • therefore non-human animals can neither do wrong, nor violate any being's moral rights
  • therefore when one animal preys on another animal it does not do anything wrong, nor does it violate the rights of the other animal
  • therefore no wrong is committed when one animal preys on another animal
  • therefore there is nothing that human beings are required to prevent

Ethical Question: Does it seem strange that an animal can be killed without its right to live being violated? (It may help to ask yourself whether you would think an animal had had its rights violated if it was killed in an earthquake.)

Ethical Question: Is it morally right or wrong for human beings deliberately to introduce predators into a habitat in order to manage animal populations and prevent environmental damage?