Crop deaths (extended - not the same thing you’ve debunked 100x)
[FINAL EDIT:
I will likely not be responding to further comments as my question has been sufficiently answered. Here are the answers I felt were the best / most relevant. Apologies if I missed out any.
Hunting is incredibly unsustainable and can only feed a small fraction of the population. Most people do not have the means / ideal location to hunt. Thus, if we are taking the ideal case of eating animals, we should compare it to the ideal case of eating plants - veganic farming.
Even if we did “steal” land from the animals, at best, it is only a reason not to take more land for agriculture. It is not an argument against protecting our food source on the land we have already taken to feed our population. As an example, many sovereign nations were formed by conquering / stealing land, but these nations still have a right to protect their borders from illegal immigrants, as well as protect their inhabitants and infrastructure from terrorists.
By the doctrine of double effect, accidentally killing animals while trying to get rid of “intruder” animals destroying our crops is still morally preferable to hunting down and killing animals. ]
[EDIT:
Many vegans are saying that hunting is not preferable because it is not scalable to feed the whole population. However, that doesn’t mean that those who can hunt shouldn’t hunt, especially if it results in fewer deaths.
Many vegans are saying that hunting is a best-case animal scenario that should be compared to the best-case plant scenario, veganic / indoor vertical farming. But this does not answer the question. Why are you / we choosing to eat monocropped plants which cause more deaths if we have the option to hunt?
A non-vegan gave me another argument against veganism. Foraging for meat that is going to be wasted / thrown away definitely causes fewer deaths than eating monocropped plants, but most vegans don’t support that. Why? ]
Vegan here.
The most common and obvious response to the crop deaths argument is that consuming meat, dairy and eggs requires more crops to be grown and harvested (resulting in more crop deaths) due to the caloric inefficiency of filtering crops through farmed animals. This is the case even for grassfed cows as they are fed hay and silage, which has to be grown and harvested on cropland.
However, some non-vegans have remarked that hunting animals for meat would likely result in fewer overall deaths than eating a plant-based diet as hunting involves zero crop deaths.
To this counterargument, I would normally respond with something like this. Most crop deaths occur as a result of pesticides applied to protect our crops. Killing in defence of property, especially an important food source, is morally justified since we cannot reason with these animals. Failure to do so would allow animals to mow down our crops and this would result in mass starvations.
An analogy for this is that most people would agree that killing 3 intruders who are destroying your property (assuming you cannot use communication or law) is justified, while killing 1 innocent person for pleasure is not justified, even though the former scenario involves more deaths.
Recently, however, I came across 2 further counter arguments:
Our cropland is technically not ours to begin with, since we took the land from other animals when we started agriculture.
Pesticides often kill many animals who aren’t eating our crops.
So how do I debunk the crop deaths argument then? Is it more ethical to hunt animals for meat if it results in fewer deaths?