On Hunters in Welfare Organizations
A long-time Animal Person reader posed a question and requested that I pose it to you. It's a two-parter.
1) Would you say that the average person wouldn't think that an animal welfare organization being a hunter is unethical?
2) Do you think it's unethical?
(There's a Chief Animal Health Officer who is an avid hunter.)
If that person's role is to reduce distress, suffering and pain, and they do the opposite of that in their spare time, should they lose their job or this incongruity?
Perhaps.
But on the other hand, animal welfare organizations do not require veganism, and if the Chief Animal Health Officer pays someone else to kill animals for him, is that so much better than him doing it himself?
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Question 2:
I think hunting is unethical, whether it's done by someone in animal welfare or not, so yes. It's true that a skilled hunter who eats the flesh of the being that she kills probably causes less suffering than she would were she to buy the same quantity of flesh from her local supermarket. But this is in the same sense that I cause less suffering if I (randomly) break your kneecap, than I do if I cut off your whole leg.
Question 1:
Based on the above, I think that someone who is fully entrenched in the Animal Welfare Camp might consider it to be ethical to skillfully hunt for one's food. Ironically though, I would guess that most animal welfare advocates oppose hunting. I think people tend to take particular exception to the joy that hunters seem to get out of taking life, as opposed to the way in which the life is taken, or the type of life that was lived prior to its extinction. The issue starts to get convoluted, I believe, because the premise is suspect. The bottom line is: I don't need to break your kneecap at all.
Obviously, anyone who has seen my comments here or has read my blog knows that I think hunting is literally murder. It’s not merely ‘unethical” but a grave moral wrong.
I see all traditional welfare organizations (e.g. HSUS) as pro-use, pro-slaughter, pro-hunting, and pro-exploitation in general, so I don’t see any conflict of interest in an avid hunter’s involvement in a traditional welfare organization. Traditional welfare organizations themselves are deplorable entities.
New welfarist organizations, such as PETA and Farm Sanctuary, are a trickier issue, since they promote veganism and claim to want hunting to stop, yet engage in many of the same cooperation with industry that traditional welfarists do. Overall, it would probably be a conflict of interest for, say, Ingrid Newkirk to be an avid hunter, but then again, given PETA’s cooperation with KFC Canada and similar welfarist activities, maybe it would not be a conflict of interest. It’s a gray area since PETA seems to both encourage and discourage killing nonhumans and, like their leader, Peter Singer, doesn’t see anything wrong with killing nonhumans.
Speaking of hunting, here's the latest campaign to end the hunting of bears in British Columbia, this one aimed at trophy hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest:
http://www.pacificwild.org/site/press/1237248597.html
The argument is framed in terms of sustainability, Aboriginal rights, tourism, "cruelty", and a general revulsion against trophy hunting — not in terms of animal rights. Still, it strikes me as an abolitionist campaign (to abolish trophy hunting) deserving of support, even if everyone else involved is a welfarist lackey of human supremacy.
I work at an animal shelter. One of my former co-workers was an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman, and he was proud of the fact.
Another example: One of the veterinarians in this area does pro bono wildlife rehabbing. His practice has a whole section of the building set aside for wildlife — it's almost like a small zoo. Oh, and this same vet is also an avid hunter.
Talk about moral schizophrenia…
My theory is that most veterinarians and most animal-shelter workers are not true animal lovers. Instead, they fetishize certain subsets of animals (mostly dogs and cats) while totally ignoring the plight of other sentient creatures.