A little off subject, but I want to start a movement to have farmers raise a few cows and pigs in the old method, letting them roam around and forage, not treating them horribly, and then selling the meat directly to consumers. Because if you bought an entire cow's worth of cuts at a grocer, it's an astronomical sum, even as the rancher is getting barely enough to get by from it, the agriconglomerates hold the gates and are squeezing everyone, and it's forced these factory style farms to proliferate to stay in business, as the corporates won't pay enough for the old style of farming to be worth it, but still charge more than enough so that old way would more than be worth it if we cut out the parasitical mega corporations.

It's kind of baked in though, usda inspections and the like on beef, it's illegal to go outside of them really, barriers to entry that probably are ruinously expensive for someone doing a handful of cow shares, but affordable for a conglomerate doing a thousand head

But there's a way around it, doing cow share programs, selling directly to people but it's grey area.

Anyway it's a major harm reduction as far as I'm concerned. People aren't going to stop buying meat. We can give farmers more money, save consumers money, and give the animals better lives, by cutting out these mega corporations from the deal, and in doing it with meat, it's an in to do all sorts of vegetables and the like as well, we need community sponsored agriculture that is not more expensive than the grocers, and I think that's more possible now with rising grocery costs.

Sure, you can hunt without guns. I don’t really see an argument for not using them though, as long as there’s no lead.

In the isolated context of lead poisoning alone, sure, banning lead is an answer.

In the greater context of gun ownership in general, it's more tricky.

But i wasn't advocating either , simply pointing out that banning guns and allowing hunting aren't mutually exclusive.

What’s really the ethical or environment argument in favor of only allowing bows, or whatever?

There are some , but i wasn't pushing for any so i'm not sure they are relevant here.

I see the emotional appeal, if people have a negative view of guns. Not a logical appeal though, besides maybe making them harder to access to prevent deaths by firearms.

Either you haven't thought this all way through or you are intentionally ignoring the whole host of other emotional and logical arguments around gun control.

If you can ban hunting with firearms, you can also just ban using lead ammo, so I don’t see how banning them is the best option in general.

As was said previously, in this isolated context you are probably right, in any kind of wider context, not so much.

I didn’t make any proposals in my above comment. It’s entirely statements of observations. I don’t know what you mean by saying you don’t see how they would work or not. I gave explanations of why hunting isn’t negative, and is often positive, but not any proposals of how anything should be done. Would you care to elaborate?

That's possibly my bad, i meant more that you were making statements without any (written) consideration to the wider context in which they were made.

I don't necessarily disagree(or agree) with you, but i absolutely think your arguments need work.

Examples:

I will preface this by saying that my perspective on "nature" is that we are part of it, even will all the fucked up self destructive stuff we have going on , so it's not like we can really do anything "unnatural", i use the term natural below to mean nature if we didn't have such an outsized effect on natural processes.

From an environmental perspective, hunting keeps pray populations in naturally healthy levels, since most of their predators are driven out of populated areas, because people don’t like to be attacked by wild animals.

That's only true in an ecosystem where the predator (us) and the prey are in natural equilibrium, which I’m sure you'll agree is absolutely not the case.

Without that natural equilibrium you need formal and enforced regulation to make this work.

This magical "naturally healthy" state of existence glosses over a lot of problems with that statement.

It also doesn’t consume many resources, as they’re just living their lives in nature.

Also requires a natural equilibrium or regulation as a baseline.

I don’t think there’s any valid argument against hunting honestly, besides just being grossed out by it. I can’t construct a good argument against it though, and I suspect you can’t either.

Overhunting and ecosystem collapse, trophy hunting, selective hunting (think ivory), disease control, hunting for "sport" (think fox "hunting").

Those were just off the top of my head.

and remember animals dying and being eaten is natural, and frequently necessary to maintain an equilibrium that was evolved to be maintained by external factors

an equilibrium, not the only equilibrium, it also mentions evolution of equilibriums but is presented from a perspective that the equilibrium presented is now fixed (it is not).

we are also animals, so us dying and being eaten also fall under this, so by that rationale another effective solution could be to reintroduce more (non-human) predators and a few of us die here and there, but the animal populations now stay under control.

Deer, for example, will die horrible deaths of starvation, and do damage to the environment, if they aren’t hunted by humans.

Until a new equilibrium is reached, because that's how ecosystems work (or collapse, depending).

"Damage" is relative and a natural part of the evolution(or collapse) of ecosystems.

Where I grew up, most people use a Have-a-Heart trap or a snare, then a knife or captive bolt gun (no bulltets).

Coyotes are also present in many places in the US, and birds of prey can harm pets too.

No excuse for eliminating a healthy and necessary species from the ecology. Human ego trumps all

So do hunting licenses in the US. Wildlife enforcement has some of the most authority in the state.

The issue is the states allow inherently unsafe munitions to be used. If they changed hunters in the US would comply

You tend to be generous with what you discard because you don't want to eat lead.

I could only find one report where they measured Pb in blood. People who self reported eating game meat in Utah had 30% higher lead levels than people who did not.