The Hunting Paradox

This is my first entry into my list of high entropy thoughts, which I described yesterday as ideas that you wouldn't expect the same person to have. I've already blurbed in on Facebook, but I have a chance to go into more detail here.

The weak version of this idea I'll term the hunting paradox, and I think it's actually quite widely held by anyone who's thought about it for a long time. Among vegetarians and flexitarians, it's not uncommon for someone to say that they prefer it if I hunt my meat, if I need to eat meat at all. If your main reasons for vegetarianism are the ethics of mass farming or environmental worries, this would be quite rational.

My version was more deliberately provocative: "I think westerners have an ethical imperative to eat less meat. And I think big game trophy hunting is a critical part of protecting wildlife in Africa and should be encouraged"

A few caveats to start: I am not a vegetarian, and don't think that everyone should become one. I also think that the kind of person who gets excited about killing elephants or is proud of pictures posed next to lions has an unethical attachment to violence, and I find the act gratuitous and sad.

However, I have been convinced by the mounting bodies of evidence that most people should eat less meat, and on the margin become vegetarian if they can do so healthily. I myself avoid meat one day a week and don't eat chicken if I don't know where it's been sourced. These are for all the typical environmental and humanitarian reasons, which have been well documented and are easy to find if you don't deliberately try to ignore them (the oft quoted health benefits, on the other hand, are spurious if not deliberately misleading).

As for the benefits of wild game hunting, I was finally won over by this classic hunting club argument by Catherine Semcer on this episode of EconTalk (another excellent podcast). In a world without poaching, it might not be necessary, but because of the money it can provide to local people in the relevant sections of Sub-Saharan Africa, it has simply emerged as the best option to protect endangered species. This doesn't work in the Cecil the Lion case, and I have no evidence that it works outside of Africa.

High entropy thoughts don't have to be the things we are most passionate about, they rarely are, but in my circles it pays to have some good examples of places where you've changed your mind based on good evidence, and I heartily recommend you try to find yourself some similar circles if you can.