Trophy Hunting Is Wrong Only If Hunting for Meat Is Wrong

(Top Left) Ernest Hemingway with Lion; (Top Right) Teddy Roosevelt with Elephant; (Bottom Left) American Dentist Walter Palmer with Lion; (Bottom Right) American Accountant Sabrina Corgatelli with Impala

On July 2nd, 2015, American dentist Walter Palmer (legally) killed a lion named Cecil, a favorite of visitors of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The news of Cecil’s death and several unsavory pictures of Palmer went viral, prompting a vicious backlash against Palmer and an international discussion about the morality of trophy hunting. People all over the world condemned the practice, and many people became convinced that trophy hunting is immoral.

My topic in this post is the morality of trophy hunting. Instead of denouncing or defending the practice, I argue that a distinction often drawn by opponents of the practice cannot be maintained. Some people find trophy hunting inherently reprehensible yet believe that hunting for meat is not. In my view, there is no inherent morally significant difference between trophy hunting and hunting for meat. So, trophy hunting ought to be universally condemned only if meat hunting ought to be universally condemned.

First, let’s get clear on some terms and the scope of my claims. By ‘trophy hunting,’ I mean hunting (or fishing) purely for sport, trophies, or prestige, without the intention of keeping some of the meat for consumption. By ‘meat hunting,’ I mean hunting (or fishing) with the intention of keeping some meat for consumption.[1] Importantly, I limit my discussion to hunting as it is practiced by middle-class and upper-class westerners who do not need to hunt to sustain themselves.

Now, to the argument.

Most people believe that animals matter, morally speaking. Although people disagree about how much and in what ways animals matter, there are zones of clear consensus. For instance, almost everyone would agree that it would be wrong to vivisect a stray dog in order to amuse guests at a cocktail party, mainly because the great harm that would be done to the dog by such an action would not be outweighed by other sufficiently important moral considerations. Likewise, almost everyone would agree that hunting is permissible only if the harm or setback to the hunted animal is outweighed by other morally important considerations. If hunting were, in general, perfectly analogous to frivolous vivisection, everyone would universally condemn it.

As it stands, hunting is not perfectly analogous to frivolous vivisection. While both activities involve animal suffering and death, the former but not the latter is associated with morally important goods. For one, hunting can have beneficial environmental and social effects. Hunting can be used to control invasive species, raise money for conservation, and so forth. Then there are the benefits to the hunter. I’m told hunting can be deeply pleasurable. It can be exhilarating, relaxing, challenging, satisfying, even transcendent. Consider the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s description of the experience:

When one is hunting, the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters the lungs, the rocks acquire a more expressive physiognomy, and the vegetation becomes loaded with meaning. But all this is due to the fact that the hunter, while he advances or waits crouching, feels tied through the earth to the animal he pursues, whether the animal is in view, hidden, or absent.[2]

Unlike the experience of a few drunken partygoers swilling Negronis while gawking in morbid fascination at the innards of a dying dog, the experience Gasset describes seems significantly valuable and worth promoting. Apart from the experience of hunting, the projects, skills, activities, and communities connected with the practice are part of what makes life meaningful and interesting to many hunters. And finally, there are the spoils. Trophy hunters obtain war stories, heads, antlers—that sort of thing. Meat hunters obtain meat. Hunters desire these spoils and are pleased when they obtain them, and since we have moral reason to care about whether a person is pleased and gets what they want, the spoils are morally important too.

Now you might think that the goods associated with hunting can never outweigh its morally objectionable features. If so, then you already believe that there is no morally important distinction between trophy and meat hunting, since both are intrinsically wrong. Most people, however, believe that hunting is permissible so long as it yields some combination of the goods just enumerated. In other words, the overall benefits of the practice can outweigh the harm to the hunted animal. For instance, you might think that deer hunting is permissible so long as the practice benefits the ecosystem and the hunter eats the meat.

I believe that consequentialist ideas of this sort are what usually lead people to conclude that there is some inherent moral difference between meat hunting and trophy hunting. Somehow, the fact that someone consumes parts of the hunted animal is supposed to justify the harm done to the animal in a way that nothing else, except perhaps direct environmental or social benefits, can.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the value gained by eating hunted meat is not relevantly different than the value associated with the hunting experience itself or with the procurement of trophies. Eating hunted meat may be especially pleasurable, but it does not provide a well-off westerner with any more sustenance than could be obtained by eating beans and a B12 supplement. Thus, when trying to determine if the suffering and death of a hunted animal is compensated for by the good that comes of it, we shouldn’t count the fact that the hunter will obtain sustenance by hunting, since the hunter will have sustenance either way. All the value gained by eating a hunted animal as opposed to letting the animal be and eating beans comes from the special pleasure obtained by eating the hunted animal.[3]

And here’s the thing. In principle, a trophy hunter can get the same amount of pleasure out of admiring a stuffed lion’s head or telling a great story as the meat hunter can get from eating hunted meat. In fact, the trophy hunter’s pleasure is likely to be longer lasting, since trophies, unlike meat, needn’t be consumed to be enjoyed. So, if trophy hunting is universally morally problematic because the suffering and death of the animal can never be outweighed by the benefits of the practice, then meat hunting is universally problematic, too, since both produce basically the same types of benefits. There is simply no inherent morally important difference between meat hunting and trophy hunting.

Let me consider two objections.

An objector might point out that trophy hunting is more likely than meat hunting to have negative environmental and social effects. If so, then trophy hunters need to be more careful in selecting their targets than meat hunters. But at most this is a contingent feature of trophy hunting and doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of the practice itself.

An objector might argue that eating a hunted animal’s meat is the only way to properly respect its dignity. But I find this hard to accept. First, it’s all the same to the dead animal; unlike humans, animals do not have wishes or customs concerning the handling of their corpses. Second, a carcass left in the field by a hunter undergoes the same fate as a carcass of an animal that died naturally. How, then, can this fate constitute an indignity?

My argument, if successful, shows that from a moral perspective there is nothing special about trophy hunting. When an incident like the one involving Palmer and Cecil next captures the world’s attention, I think it would be a mistake for us to focus on the trophy hunting aspect. The relevant questions concern the morality of hunting the type of animal killed and of hunting (by well-to-do westerners) generally.
 
[1] Notice that according to these definitions someone who is both hunting for meat and for trophies counts as a meat hunter, not a trophy hunter. I am interested in recreational hunting, so I ignore cases where the hunter hunts primarily in order to produce some environmental or social benefit (e.g. killing a rabid bear that threatens a populace). But I leave it open as to whether hunting is permissible only if it produces environmental or social benefits. Since both trophy and meat hunting can, in principle, produce such benefits, it is not necessary for me to settle this question here.
[2] Trans. by Howard B. Wescott. Meditations on Hunting, Wilderness Adventures Press, Inc, 1995, p. 131.
[3] An analogy might make this point clearer. Suppose you are trying to decide between eating dinner at two equally healthy but differently priced restaurants. The fact that you will eat something healthy if you go to the more expensive restaurant cannot play a part in justifying the extra money you would spend going there, because you will eat something healthy in either case. Spending the extra money is worth it only if the more expensive restaurant will provide you with a sufficiently more pleasurable gustatory experience.