I agree with that to a point. Eating and sport aren't the only motivations behind hunting. Feral animal control is by far the largest motivator for hunting in Australia. Obviously there are trophies involved in the way of antlers, jawbones, skins, etc, but they are secondary.
I hunt, and I can't understand how anyone anywhere on earth hunts and kills native species, unless it's for food. What I find especially abhorrent is people hunting predators in their native habitat for no better reason than to take a trophy. That is sick.
I've never been interested enough in hunting to do it myself, but have never understood the abhorence toward trophy hunting. Guess maybe I see it from the animal's point of view, because it's just as dead, regardless of why it was killed.
Unless there's so much hunting pressure that animals are being driven to extinction, I don't see the problem, and the pressure could come from food hunting as well as trophy hunting.
Perhaps it's a way of limiting the amount of game taken, because people can only eat so much, but they could theoretically take limitless trophies? But it seems a round-about way to do it. One trophy or one freezer-full of meat requires the death of the same individual animal; if over-hunting is a problem, the death of subsequent animals is what's wrong, not the use of the first one.
The other thing that puzzles me about hunting is the negative feelings toward things that make it too easy.
I understand that making hunting more challenging may make it more personally satisfying for the hunter when he/she does succeed. But society generally has no moral problem with using the most certain, quick methods for killing cattle or hogs, and in fact would be appalled if slaughterhouse workers were chasing cattle around and letting some get away scared but safe each day. So I don't see why the same behavior--using the most efficient killing methods--is considered unsporting for hunters.
Again, I wonder if it is/was a way of encouraging hunters not to kill
too many animals, by limiting the amount of game they could take by classifying some methods as "unsporting."
