Animals Cliparts

Is Hunting Animals Justified?
In ancient times, men hunted animals for basic needs of food and survival. However with the advent of farms and the domestication of farm animals and poultry, humans now have a stable source of food without having to rely on hunting. However, hunting is still present today both on land and in the sea. The alarming rise in the number of endangered species in the world today is a testament of how hunting is still dominant today.




Hunting is cruel if it is done merely to satisfy vain pleasures like a fur coat or as a trophy hanging in the hunter's house. The decimation of elephants for their tusks to serve as ornaments, the slaughter of tigers for their hides, the killing of rhinoceroses for some fabled aphrodisiac value of their horn or the capture of orang utans to be sold as pets are all quite unnecessary and cruel. These poachers hunt the animals mercilessly with little regard over the fact that they are wiping out an entire species form the face of the world to satisfy their own material greed.

It would however be wrong to assume that all forms of hunting is unnecessary. Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons to condone hunting. For example, if a predator like a man-eating shark or tiger is terrorizing humans, than it may be necessary to allow for a hunt to track the animal down as human lives may be threatened by the animal. In addition, in some cases, some animals like field rats reproduce and multiply so quickly that they become a menace to crops and hence their population would have to be forcibly reduced by hunting.

Although the act of killing an animal is always cruel regardless of the mitigating circumstances, hunting should not always be perceived as something that is unnecessary in today's world. We need to distinguish whether there is a justified cause to sanction a hunt; in this case, hunting is necessary if human lives are threatened by the animals. It would be too idealistic a view to imagine that humans and animals can live harmoniously without the need for hunting but this does not mean that mindless slaughter is good. Instead as rational human beings, we should be able to distinguish between what is acceptable or not.