Harvesting Food

As long as people are hunting for the purpose of eating the animals they kill, then I don't consider it immoral. People who are not vegetarians can't argue that hunting for your own food is moral because it isn't any different than buying meat from the grocery store. Someone else just killed it for you.

In Steve Rinella's book, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, Steve shows a clear example of consumption in America. Killing unique animals for forty five different courses to be completed in three nights seems somewhat impossible and unnecessary. It didn't seem like Steve and his friends needed this much food. So, in his case killing his own food didn't necessarily keep him from wasting. However, I think that we might have a greater appreciation for our food if we hunted and prepared it ourselves and therefore would not waste food as much. Often, meat is packaged in large portions at the grocery store. This either leads to too much consumption, leading to our obesity problem in America or too much waste. If we all hunted for ourselves we could learn to appreciate what we are eating more and to not be so wasteful.

I think that it is hard to draw the line of whether hunting is moral or not. I feel that it is not moral as a sport but that it is moral if you are hunting for the purpose of food. However, what about killing animals for clothing or other accessories such as fur? This still serves a purpose. Although I think it is wrong for people to hunt as a sport and not for eating, I don't think that there should be a law against it. Personally, I would not feel comfortable hunting my own food. I think that I would have a much harder time eating meat if I was the one who killed it. When I was a kid I used to go fishing with my dad. If I caught a fish I would immediately put it right back in the water because I felt too guilty killing it. My dad would catch a fish and then gut it apart. I think the reason I felt so guilty is because we would fish just for fun when we went on vacation. We never actually ate the fish. Thinking back on it now, I think that it was wrong to kill a living thing for enjoyment.

For information on harvesting foods in Papua New Guinea check this book out:

Benediktsson, Karl. Harvesting Development: the Construction of Fresh Food Markets in Papua New Guinea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 2002.

HD9018.P363 B46 2002

Paul- for some reason when I pushed Ctrl U it didn't underline, so the title of the book is not underlined in my paper or my bibliography. Sorry!