[tivodan1116]

Quote by: Matt The difference between a wolf killing an animal and a human killing an animal: A) One needs the food, and one doesn't

False. Wolves are pretty much as capable of metabolizing nutrients through plants as we are. What you mean is that they have evolved into meat-eating animals. And on that point...

B) One is actually hunting, while the other hops out of the back of a truck and shoots an animal with a non natural, non 'fair' item.

This is the argument that always annoys me the most, usually because the people that make it claim to be some kind of nature lovers yet are woefully ignorant of how nature and biology have worked over millions of years...

Ok, I'm going to explain this very carefully:

• All animals have evolved.
• Human beings are just one particular species of animal.
• Animals evolve traits that allow them to survive.
• The human trait that has allowed us to survive is INTELLIGENCE.
• Through our intelligence, we learn to make TOOLS.
• We use those tools to accomplish survival.
• Humans using their intelligence to create a gun to shoot an animal is NO DIFFERENT than a wolf using its strength, sense of smell, and sharp teeth to hunt an animal. We evolved certain traits, they evolved others.

Get it?

Quote by: The Dunedan Cows exist for me to eat them. If you'd ever seen the utter idiocy (inconveniently and dangerously combined with great size) of a cow at close range, you'd understand this. Likewise sheep, which are even dumber, although thankfully much smaller. Chickens, Guineas, etc...all fall at about the same level, with domestic Turkeys being so abysmally stupid that they can drown in a rainstorm. No animal remotely approaching that level of idiocy would survive to reproductive age in the wild, where a great many things -still- don't, despite being smarter. Cats, dogs, horses, etc...are somewhat more intelligent, although I've met a few Irish Setters too dumb to find their way out of a phone booth. Added to this, they perform useful functions for us (hunting mice, gaurding the house, pulling things etc) and make lousy meat, so we keep them as companions rather than food. This suits me just fine, since I can't imagine dog tastes very good in any language other than Korean, and cats seem too stringy to be worth the effort. Horse is good, properly prepared, but is easy to get wrong. As for hunting, this is what we call reality: humans are an evolutionary pressure, just like any other sort of predation. We're a part of nature, just like the animals are, and our nature is omnivorism tilted sharply to carnivorism. I hunt because I can spend $.75 on a bullet, or $75+ for the same amount of dead animal at the grocery store. I'm a human, the animals aren't. I'm at the top of the food chain, they're not. My ancestors evolved for 5 million years to get up here, theirs didn't.

Well said. You're obviously someone who, unlike our OPer, understands and appreciates where our food comes from and the true role that human beings play.