In the past, one could easily justify hunting as a necessary action. Before agriculture was even a thing, humans could only survive by foraging, scavenging, and hunting. There was no such thing as farms and crops yet.
And even when agriculture was discovered, hunting was still an important part of life. Not everyone would have adapted to the farming lifestyle immediately, meaning that hunting would remain a stable way of getting meat on the table, before cows and pigs actually came into play.
But it’s a little different in the modern age. We have no troubles with getting livestock now. There are factories all over the world that do it for us, and we don’t even need to learn how to hunt like our ancestors did. For most of civilization, hunting has instead turned into a sport that many people look down upon due to misrepresentation. And yet, even with all our industrialization, hunting does serve an important purpose. If not for our own personal needs, but also for the environment.
Helping nature…. in a surprising way.
You’ve probably heard of the term “Breeding like rabbits” before, and it’s not an exaggeration as you might think. As the phrase suggests, it refers to the fact that rabbits are able to reproduce extremely rapidly because of the way their fertility works. For instance, a rabbit can start their reproductive life cycle in as early as 4 months! Not only that, when the mother gives birth to more rabbits, she becomes fertile practically immediately! In theory, this means that rabbits can reproduce near-instantaneously and have a litter every month of the year!
Rabbits are cute and fluffy, but this can be a problem for communities with a large rabbit population. They’ll be competing with other herbivores for food and shelter, eating away the greens and leaving little for other animals to pick. Not only that, but it can also attract many predators and maintain or even increase their amount, such as foxes and feral cats. This turns those animals into a big problem as well.
And those are just the effects that rabbits can have when their population is left unchecked! We can take a look at deer as well, the more commonly hunted animal. You’d think that having a lot of deer in the forest is good, but if they don’t have enough predators, it can very troubling (and even dangerous!) to humans as well as the forests that they inhabit. What I mean is, the more deer in the forest, the more likely that you will encounter one out on the road. If you’re a driver that isn’t paying attention, a split-second is enough to make you crash if a deer just so happens to jump into the road. And even if you’re paying attention, it might cause you to swerve and still cause an accident nonetheless. And of course, like rabbits, an abundance of deer can disrupt wildlife communities by eating away the habitat of other animals too much. They can also disrupt the soil itself and cause irreversible changes to its composition, and this is simply from eating too much!
It can also be used to fund actual conservation efforts.
Have you ever wondered where the money you spend for your hunting license and fees go to? The hunting industry generates quite a lot of money from its taxes, and the money that it manages to get is used for environmental efforts and conservation of nature. That’s right, the money goes into things likes park maintenance, management, and even restoration for the wildlife that inhabit them.
Not only that, but the funds also go to actually protecting wild animals and their natural habitats from things like poachers and other aspects of nature that put them in precarious situations. This ensures that such animals would be able to have healthy populations in the wild.
In the United States, it especially helps that the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act created an excess tax for firearms, ammunitions, and archery equipment purchases made by people, and these tax dollars go directly to funding wildlife conservation all over the country. In other words, the money that people spend to hunt, especially the tax associated with it, is actually well-spent in making sure that animals are treated fairly and the environment is treated well in the long run.
Conclusion
Hunting gets a really bad reputation due to bringing harm to animals, but sometimes it can be a necessity to combat things like overpopulation of certain herbivores. If we were to simply let nature take its course, they would overrun forests and plants and destroy all the soil, plants, and nutrients alongside it. The money people spend on hunting meanwhile, goes to real conservation efforts in ensuring that animals are not in danger of becoming endangered, much less extinct.
This does not mean hunting is a perfect sport, of course. There are plenty of people out there that hunt in an attempt to make a profit, sometimes illegally. These people are referred to as poachers instead of hunters as a result, and these are the type of people who don’t actually care about the wildlife if it means making a quick buck out of it. Hunters, on the other hand, are more likely to care about it, especially if they go through all the legal trouble of actually paying hunting fees and taxes to participate in hunting. It is, of course, regulated as well to ensure that hunters don’t overhunt areas either, because that is just equally as bad.