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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Sure, you can hunt without guns. I don't really see an argument for not using them though, as long as there's no lead. What's really the ethical or environment argument in favor of only allowing bows, or whatever? I see the emotional appeal, if people have a negative view of guns. Not a logical appeal though, besides maybe making them harder to access to prevent deaths by firearms. If you can ban hunting with firearms, you can also just ban using lead ammo, so I don't see how banning them is the best option in general.
I didn't make any proposals in my above comment. It's entirely statements of observations. I don't know what you mean by saying you don't see how they would work or not. I gave explanations of why hunting isn't negative, and is often positive, but not any proposals of how anything should be done. Would you care to elaborate?
Where I grew up, most people use a Have-a-Heart trap or a snare, then a knife or captive bolt gun (no bulltets).
Scenario A: You're minding your own business, when a bullet passes through your heart/lungs and you're dead in seconds.
Scenario B: You get caught in a trap and wait for hours for an ape with a knife or a bolt gun to come along and finish the job.
Honestly, if I were an animal, I'd prefer Scenario A.
Have-A-Heart traps are used by animal welfare groups and animal shelters, so I don't know if it's so bad to wait in the trap, unless said animal groups are incorrect to use said traps. Admittedly, cats who have never encountered these traps sometimes freak out when first trapped, and cats who have seen them before can outsmart them easily. I've never thought they were good for trapping cats, as they are specifically designed NOT to trap cats.
Have-A-Heart traps are intended to trap furbearing animals but allow for the release of cats, dogs or endagered species. You've probably seen them before. These staps are box rectangle shaped, chrome colored, and are activated when the animal places their weight on the lever in the back of the trap. These are also called double door traps.
Bolt guns are commonly used in animal slaughter and are often considered 'humane.' If you eat red meat, the cow was likely killed with a captive bolt gun.
I'm familiar with all of the technology involved, but I'm not sure about the applications you're describing.
With a Have-A-Heart, the specific goal is live capture and release. There is no killing involved. The animal might be properly freaked out at the experience of being trapped, but that is specifically so as to permit an animal's live relocation.
With a bolt gun, it's meant to be used in a slaughterhouse scenario, which is a whole moral discussion of its own, but at bare minimum one wants the animals to be kept as calm as possible until the bolt gun is applied, because stressed out meat tastes worse than calm and placid up until the moment of death.
With hunting, the goal is to kill the target as cleanly as possible, preferably with a single bullet. That's the Scenario A I'm describing above.
If one were hunting an animal with the intent of killing it, then a trap, followed by a knife or bolt gun, would maximize the terror felt by the animal to be killed. Sure, one may be putting less lead out in the environment, but at the cost of putting the animal through... almost the most appalling experience of death possible, with the admitted exception of a poorly-aimed bullet or arrow, followed by a wounded flight through the woods and slowly bleeding out.
So... if one's absolute maximum goal is to reduce environmental lead, yes, that is one way to do it, but the moral implications of that method seem pretty rough.
That works. I'm not saying you can't hunt with other methods. I'm just saying that I can't see much of an argument against the use of leadless firearms for hunting, besides a weak gun control one (hunting weapons aren't a significant portion of the danger from firearms, mostly handguns or rifles like the AR-15). People can hunt however they want, or not at all, as long as it is controlled to healthy levels and doesn't cause any other issues, and, ideally doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to the animal.
There isn't any argument for gun control. Tell the CIA to stop grooming kids on Discord and Telegram to do school shootings, problem solved. Notice this never happens in Iceland. That's because their version of the CIA isn't on Discord.
In the isolated context of lead poisoning alone, sure, banning lead is an answer.
In the greater context of gun ownership in general, it's more tricky.
But i wasn't advocating either , simply pointing out that banning guns and allowing hunting aren't mutually exclusive.
There are some , but i wasn't pushing for any so i'm not sure they are relevant here.
Either you haven't thought this all way through or you are intentionally ignoring the whole host of other emotional and logical arguments around gun control.
As was said previously, in this isolated context you are probably right, in any kind of wider context, not so much.
That's possibly my bad, i meant more that you were making statements without any (written) consideration to the wider context in which they were made.
I don't necessarily disagree(or agree) with you, but i absolutely think your arguments need work.
Examples:
I will preface this by saying that my perspective on "nature" is that we are part of it, even will all the fucked up self destructive stuff we have going on , so it's not like we can really do anything "unnatural", i use the term natural below to mean nature if we didn't have such an outsized effect on natural processes.
That's only true in an ecosystem where the predator (us) and the prey are in natural equilibrium, which I’m sure you'll agree is absolutely not the case.
Without that natural equilibrium you need formal and enforced regulation to make this work.
This magical "naturally healthy" state of existence glosses over a lot of problems with that statement.
Also requires a natural equilibrium or regulation as a baseline.
Overhunting and ecosystem collapse, trophy hunting, selective hunting (think ivory), disease control, hunting for "sport" (think fox "hunting").
Those were just off the top of my head.
an equilibrium, not the only equilibrium, it also mentions evolution of equilibriums but is presented from a perspective that the equilibrium presented is now fixed (it is not).
we are also animals, so us dying and being eaten also fall under this, so by that rationale another effective solution could be to reintroduce more (non-human) predators and a few of us die here and there, but the animal populations now stay under control.
Until a new equilibrium is reached, because that's how ecosystems work (or collapse, depending).
"Damage" is relative and a natural part of the evolution(or collapse) of ecosystems.
If we're talking about gun control, fine. I'm all for reasonable gun control. I don't think targeting hunting rifles/shotguns are the most useful though. Handguns are the issue there. Still, yeah, more good gun control would be nice. Not really part of this discussion though, but that's the one argument I did consider, but doesn't really apply to hunting weapons. If we can get it passed for the weapons that actually matter, then I'd agree losing hunting weapons are fine.
Yes. That formal enforced regulation needs to exist, and I don't know anywhere that it doesn't. In the US, you need a license, and you can only kill a certain number of the animal per season, and that's all based on how many of the animals need to be culled, and it does need to be done. Equilibrium is maintained through this regulation.
I never said "naturally healthy". I said they evolved to have a certain percentage of losses. If that isn't maintained by other predators, we need to do it. It's naturally (in its current state) unhealthy. Hunting is required to keep it healthy.
Sure. That'd be another solution. If we're discussing policy, I think we can safely ignore it though. There's a lot of solutions that are not going to happen. We don't need to rule out all of them to discuss what we actually can do.
No. They boom and collapse. This repeats, until evolution takes it's course maybe, which will be quite a while. It doesn't reach an equilibrium state because they evolutionary pressures were different when they evolved. Maybe this isn't true for all prey animals, but many, such as deer and rabbits, it is. Population booms, they eat all easily available food, they die off from starvation or disease, then they boom back.
A lot of your argument against hunting is that it requires regulation. No one is arguing against that. It is needed, and this is already recognized and enforced. We just need to now enforce participation in a way that doesn't create negative externalities from lead poisoning.
Animals don't need to be culled, for the maintenance of the current pseudo equilibrium it's probably a good idea, but it's not an absolute requirement.
I literally quoted you.
Hunting is the one of the current mechanisms we use to (roughly) maintain the status quo, it's not the only mechanism, nor is it the only option, it's just one of the ones we are using right now.
Healthy is relative in multiple ways, there would be a new equilibrium on the other side of the shitstorm that would probably arise from us dropping our current efforts with no replacement.
That might be subjectively bad for us, but it would exist.
Unless there's some sort of magic book that already has the answers to what is and isn't viable then we very much do need to rule them out, that's how decisions and policies are made.
I'm not sure what the no is about given the following sentences basically say the same thing i did.
If they aren't fit they die off, a new equilibrium is reached or the ecosystem collapses.
"They boom and collapse.,This repeats, until evolution takes it’s course maybe, which will be quite a while." is one way an equilibrium is reached if the species(singular or plural) don't die off.
I'd be interested to see where you're seeing an argument against hunting from me as, afaik, i haven’t said anything to that effect.
My only argument has been that your statements were omitting what i would consider important context.
Literally nothing is required. What's your point? Are you just trying to argue about nothing? The Earth can just be destroyed. It isn't required to exist. So what? We're talking about solutions to a problem. There is a problem with lead bullets. There's also a problem with a lack of natural predation. We should try to solve these problems. We don't have to solve any problem, but what's the point in starting arguments with people online saying we don't need to solve anything?
I had to go back to see what was said. I didn't say anything was special about it being natural, like what you implied by saying it was magical. I said it's kept naturally healthy by predators, as in nature had a mechanism to keep it healthy. This isn't an appeal to nature, as you implied. It's a statement of fact. It isn't saying natural is better. It's saying there is a natural thing. Doing it without nature accomplishes the same goal. So you did "quote me" in that you used two words I also used, you didn't include anything else surrounding it, and made it say something it didn't.
As I said. We could wait for evolution to take its course. I don't think waiting centuries with booming and crashing populations of animals is a particularly smart idea. Maybe you do, but you haven't said anything other than "we don't have to do anything." Again, no shit! Stop writing these long comments saying literally nothing.
No, we don't. We don't need to discuss magical fairies taking care of the problem. We don't need to discuss finding a magic lamp to solve the problem. Some things can safely be ignored because they're so unlikely to happen.
Fair enough. You aren't making any argument besides that we should do everything but discuss how to solve these issues. Someone said hunting needed to stop. I said it's necessary for the current state of things. You've argued against what I said, which implies an argument against hunting, but really it's just an annoying "... but what about" argument making no claims and no actual arguments.
This is my last reply unless you actually want to have a discussion. If you do, discuss in good faith. We do not have to rule out things that can't reasonably happen. We should assume that suffering is at least somewhat negative. We should assume that environmental experts saying prey populations need to be culled are correct. If you don't agree to these, there isn't a discussion to be had.
TL;DR;
My only point has consistently been that your statements lacked important supporting context and are written like they are the only correct option, that weakens them.
Questioning your weak statements seems to have upset you and rather than actually responding to my only actual point you've constructed multiple other positions i've not taken.
When asked for examples you moved to "you are discussing in bad faith" (still no examples , i might add).
A discussion is impossible with someone unwilling to engage (or unable to understand) the actual position of the other party.
The rest is just a long winded version of this, feel free to skip it.
My whole point, which i have stated multiple times, is that your statements are weak.
things like "and it does need to be done." implies that it is the only answer, when it isn't.
Again, point to where anyone said we don't need to solve anything ?
If your answer to someone questioning the validity of your statements is to say "fuck it, obviously you just mean we shouldn't solve anything" then i expect there's nothing further to gain from a conversation.
I literally quoted the surrounding sentence in that reply, not just the two words, if you didn't read it , that's on you.
As i've said, multiple times, there are mechanisms in place for balance and/or collapse, healthy is subjective.
In your reply to me, yes, in the original response, not so much, which again i will remind you is the actual issue i've been mentioning this whole time.
My original reply was basically , "i don't agree or disagree with your points but perhaps add context so your arguments aren't so brittle" everything after that is responding to your questions. Its seems my responses aren't to your liking but i'm not sure there's anything i can do about that.
I'll add a TL;DR; for you so you can skim.
I never said discussion was needed, i said that ruling out options is a part of how decisions and policies are made, if you think magical fairies being ruled out requires discussion, that's on you.
In the actual context on this thread of discussion i think that artificially increased predation could be (and historically has been) a viable solution to overpopulation.
Ceding areas to wildlife has also been used.
I said specifically that a shitstorm would probably be the result of dropping our current measures without a replacement that doesn't mean other options can't be discussed.
And that whole reply was again to point out the statement you made was an implied objective fact.
I mean...no , i'll quote my repeated statements of my only arguments :
and then in this response
If you want to attribute some other argument to me (that isn't a direct response to your questions) I’d appreciate if you could point out where it was made.
All of my responses were in good faith, if you don't understand that dismissing something because it is unlikely is literally ruling out an option i can't help you with that.
I don't know what you mean by this but I’m fairly sure i haven't argued to the contrary.
Again, i haven’t argued against this, only that it's not the only option, as was implied by your statements.
I agree, "If you don’t agree to these things I’ve unilaterally stated to be true with no contextual support or citations then your responses are in bad faith" isn't a discussion, it's a personal echo chamber.