Hunting resolves conflicts of interest between humans and wildlife in a deadly, violent way, without looking for alternatives.
Today, hunting is a euphemism for a violent hobby: there is no need to hunt for food, hunters go to the store to buy food like we all do. Most of the meat of animals slaughtered in Estonia is exported.
Wild animals want to live. The hunt denies their right to life and treats living beings as
Wild animals also have families that are destroyed by hunting. If the parents of an animal family are killed, the children of the animals will inevitably die.
The purpose of the hunt is to injure and kill, not to help animals or nature. Injured animals are not taken to hospital. It would be punishable by law to treat domestic animals in the same way (eg dogs, cats).
Animals do not always die right away as they are shot, and hunters have no legal obligation to look for injured animals. This is how animals suffer for a long time. Only injuring the animals by hunters is a real phenomenon that is rarely talked about. In this situation an injured wild animal or bird remains in the wild because the hunter failed to kill him or find the injured animal. In Germany, for example, the search for a wild animal injured during a hunt is mandatory, but not in Estonia. According to data collected in Sweden and Germany, about 10% of wild animals remain injured in the wild because of hunting. Although there are no corresponding data in Estonia, there is reason to believe that this is happening here to the same extent.
There are accidents during hunting that kill people – because it is a violent hobby that uses deadly weapons.
The annual hunting terror forces the animals to flee, which causes traffic accidents in which not only animals but also people are killed.
During the hunt, large, strong animals are killed, not weak ones – nature itself would regulate differently. Trophy hunting is a business.
As a result of the hunt, the genes of the populations are becoming weaker. Unnatural selection is exacerbating the spread of new diseases. Hunting brings the ecosystem even more out of balance. The real regulators of the ecosystem are natural carnivores. For example, the very same wolves that are killed by hunters.
There is no scientific basis for controlling animal populations by humans. Nature did beautifully before people and does so after people are gone. In reality, the number of wild animals can never be determined exactly, and hunters give their own numbers, how many animals they would like to kill this season.
Hunting has no connection with nature conservation, just as fishing is not nature conservation. Hunting is wasting natural resources on a cruel hobby that is completely unnecessary.
It is also possible to just look at nature and wild animals, take pictures, film them, hike there, without killing the animals. There is no justification for hunting.