this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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[–] Senal@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

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.


[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 26 minutes ago

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 we're talking about gun control, fine. I'm all for reasonable gun control. I don't think targeting hunting rifles/shotguns are the most useful though. Handguns are the issue there. Still, yeah, more good gun control would be nice. Not really part of this discussion though, but that's the one argument I did consider, but doesn't really apply to hunting weapons. If we can get it passed for the weapons that actually matter, then I'd agree losing hunting weapons are fine.

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.

Yes. That formal enforced regulation needs to exist, and I don't know anywhere that it doesn't. In the US, you need a license, and you can only kill a certain number of the animal per season, and that's all based on how many of the animals need to be culled, and it does need to be done. Equilibrium is maintained through this regulation.

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

I never said "naturally healthy". I said they evolved to have a certain percentage of losses. If that isn't maintained by other predators, we need to do it. It's naturally (in its current state) unhealthy. Hunting is required to keep it healthy.

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.

Sure. That'd be another solution. If we're discussing policy, I think we can safely ignore it though. There's a lot of solutions that are not going to happen. We don't need to rule out all of them to discuss what we actually can do.

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

No. They boom and collapse. This repeats, until evolution takes it's course maybe, which will be quite a while. It doesn't reach an equilibrium state because they evolutionary pressures were different when they evolved. Maybe this isn't true for all prey animals, but many, such as deer and rabbits, it is. Population booms, they eat all easily available food, they die off from starvation or disease, then they boom back.

A lot of your argument against hunting is that it requires regulation. No one is arguing against that. It is needed, and this is already recognized and enforced. We just need to now enforce participation in a way that doesn't create negative externalities from lead poisoning.