Hunting is more ethical

“The animals I hunt had a good life before I killed them so it’s more ethical than factory farming. Sometimes invasive species need to be controlled, too.”

This argument doesn’t really apply to me at all. I’ve never had an interest in hunting or even holding a gun. However, if I want to go back to eating meat, is this an ethical way to do it?

One or the other?

The question isn’t whether hunting is better than factory farming. It’s whether killing the animal is better than not killing it.

The animal still wanted to live. Just because it had a good natural life frolicking in the forest, it doesn’t mean that one bad day or honouring the prey after the hunt makes up for the fact that its life was cut short.

The thrill of the hunt

Does the animal really have a fair chance? Not really. On one side we have a rifle, and the other side didn’t even know the game was on.

Oh, but what about the pleasure of the hunt? To me this falls into the same bucket as taste vs ethics. Enjoying something doesn’t make it right.

Space Invaders

“Without hunters, invasive species might cause the ecosystem to become unbalanced leading to more suffering and death among animals.”

What if it really is better to hunt certain animals for population control? Wait a second, how did these ecosystems get unbalanced in the first place? Nearly every time, the answer is us.

Imported goods

Take some of the invasive species that people sometimes hunt to eat:

• Grey squirrels were introduced to Britain from North America in 1876, and they’ve pushed out native red squirrels by outcompeting them for food and spreading squirrelpox.
• Sika deer were introduced to Britain from Japan in 1860, and they tear apart native vegetation and compete with native deer species.
• Canada geese were introduced in the 17th century as ornamental birds but cause enormous damage to grasslands, pasture, and crops.

None of these animals chose to be here. It feels a little unfair to wipe them out for a problem we created.

The way of the Dodo

It’s a similar story with native animals. When a herbivore like deer is overpopulated, you can pretty safely assume there’s a native predator missing. In Britain that means wolves, lynx and bears, all of which we hunted to extinction here.

So it’s a slightly weird that the solution to killing off the predators is to kill the prey of those predators instead of trying to bring the predators back.

Bring em back

Predators don’t just eat herbivores, they change how they behave. Ecologists call this an “ecology of fear”: grazing animals keep moving instead of stripping one spot bare, which helps stop overgrazing. And where pine martens (which we nearly wiped out) have come back, invasive grey squirrels have declined and native red squirrels have started to return.

Maybe there are times when some culling is the least-bad option. But that’s for ecologists to figure out, not me. The truth is, ecosystems are enormously complex, and a lot of the time, humans meddling is what made things worse in the first place. Managing an ecosystem and choosing to hunt for dinner are two very different things. (And if the argument is that hunters pay for conservation, I’ve looked at that separately.)

Outnumbered

If we’re worried about too many grazing animals, deer aren’t the ones to look at:

Animal	Population	Source
Sheep and lambs (UK)	~30.5 million	DEFRA, June 2025
Cattle and calves (UK)	~9.3 million	DEFRA, June 2025
Wild deer (Britain)	2 million+	Natural World Fund

Farmed sheep and cattle outnumber wild deer nearly 20 to 1, so deer are far from the biggest grazing problem we have.

Wrong reasons

And either way, “population control” is a pretty different reason to “I fancy some venison”. If someone is managing a genuine ecological problem, that’s a conversation about wild animal suffering. If someone is hunting because they enjoy it and want the meat, population control seems to me like a convenient justification rather than the real motivation.

Teach a man to hunt

Even if wild hunting were perfectly ethical, it could never feed everyone. There are 8 billion of us and nowhere near enough wild deer. If everyone tried it, there’d be no deer left within a year, which is a funny kind of population control.

So for almost everyone reading this, hunting isn’t a real alternative to the supermarket. It’s a desert island argument for a situation I’m not in.

What’s Up, Doc?

Is hunting better than factory farming? Probably, for the animal. Is it ethical? Not if I don’t need to do it. Even if it were ethical, I’m a city boy and couldn’t even imagine having to go out and kill an animal myself.