this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Just because something happens on its own in nature doesn’t mean it’s a good thing per se - for instance, I prefer the warmth of my heated house over the "natural" cold temperatures of the winter months. That’s the famous "appeal to nature" fallacy right there.
Also, like others already pointed out, hunting deer is only necessary because we eradicated most of their natural predators. Making the case for hunting today in order to fix a problem hunting created in the past feels oddly circular to me.
I mean, kinda yes, kinda no. We generally weren't hunting predators primarily for meat, but for community safety. The meat from predators was a byproduct of not wanting a bear or something to decide our children would make for a tasty snack.
It's just those predators were also what kept prey populations under control, so now we have to take over that role in order to prevent their extinction. Left to their own devices, they'll overgraze and kill the areas ability to support them, and then they all die because the area won't necessarily bounce back quickly enough as they die of starvation.
An appeal to nature is only wrong if it's saying something is good because it happens in nature. I don't believe I did so, except maybe saying it's ethically better for them to live in nature than in slaughter houses. I'd love to see an argument in favor of horrible large-scale animal raising though. That'd be interesting.
It being evolutionarily necessary isn't an appeal to nature. It's just stating a fact. It isn't a judgment. It's just a statement that overpopulation causes massive issues, and prey animals evolve to have tons of children because they were hunted (by other animals than humans) . Without hunting of some kind, their populations balloon out of control.
It's not circular, because it needs to be done. If it isn't done we have massive problems. It doesn't depend on any other logic. Sure, the issue was created, in part, by hunting also (a lot just because predators won't live near population centers though), but the argument that it needs to be done isn't dependent on you agreeing with killing predators.
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.