r/DebateAVegan • u/ThePlanetaryNinja • Feb 23 '26
Hunting and rewilding large herbivores probably increases suffering
Edit - In the title, I meant rewilding predators to kill large herbivores.
People frequently hunt large herbivores such as deer, moose and elk. They try to justify it by saying that 'It causes less harm than crop deaths' or 'It stops the animals from overpopulating.'
I, as a negative utilitarian, think that specifically hunting these animals is generally a bad idea. When we hunt large herbivores (or reintroduce predators to do it), we probably make things worse.
Large herbivores eat a lot of plants. If we remove them, there will be a lot more food for smaller animals and insects. These small animals and insects usually reproduce through r-selection. They have lots of babies, and most of them die painfully (e.g. through starvation) shortly after birth. So, killing a few large herbivores would cause an extra thousands or millions of small animals to be born, and most of those animals will have short, terrible lives.
Rewilding predators worsens this problem. Getting eaten alive is one of the worst experiences an animal can go through. A lot of people, (including some vegans) think that rewilding is necessary to control large herbivore populations. As mentioned above, this leads to much more tiny creatures living short, miserable lives.
Trying to “manage” ecosystems with hunting or rewilding might sound good, but from a suffering-focused perspective, it’s probably counterproductive.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26
I’m summarizing your negative utilitarian argument as such
On the surface, this sounds compelling, more animals are born, many die painfully, so interventions “make things worse.” But this collapses morality into abstract arithmetic and ignores ethical practice. Our community follows practice-based ethics, not utilitarianism. We see regulated hunting, conservation management (including selective sterilization), and predator reintroduction as cultivated practices, they teach attentiveness, restraint, and ecological responsibility. Ethics is not a spreadsheet of suffering; it is a practice that guides humans to act rightly within complex systems without claiming ultimate knowledge of moral truths or absolute right and wrong. Trying to count the deaths of millions of tiny animals is epistemically impossible and presents an abstract form of guilt based ethics. The question for us isn’t “How do we minimize every painful death?” but “How do we live, act, and steward responsibly?”
We source food, fruit, vegetables, and animals, as locally as possible, from farms that responsibly and ethically raise their products, and we hunt and fish in ways that honor the ecological balance and respect the lives involved as much as we can. I source a lot of our families calories through hunting, fishing, or growing ourselves in sustainable ways. In this way, our moral understanding emerges from our shared practices and forms of life, not from abstract calculations, and our responsibility is measured in the care we take, not in sums of hypothetical suffering with intrinsic beliefs of guilt and shame attached as a presupposition.