Cockroaches?
Mowing the lawn?
Roadkill?
Stepping on ants on the sidewalk?
What in the Good Lord's name does any of this have to do with one's personnel hunting ethics? Cockroaches and many other insects carry disease. Why we spray for mosquitoes, cockroaches and other bitying insects. They are a threat. Do we spray them with the intent to make them suffer? When you mow the yard, do you chuckle to yourself as you pull the rewind/turn the key and think of how much you will enjoy the toads/frogs and other small creatures you will chop up? Do you intentionally cross the centerline/go in the ditch to hit some poor critter on or close to the asphalt just for the heck of it? Good grief, I hope not.
The question asked was the ethics of one's hunting
intent. How much one considers the consequences of their shot
before they take it, depending on the species. This has nuttin' to do whether or not folks enjoy hunting, but how they feel about taking an animals life intentionally. How much they are concerned with the pain and suffering that animal does after the shot. Now, even tho I have seen many posts here on this forum from hunters that claim they have never missed, and have had only bang flops, much less ever wounded an animal and not retrieved it, I'm a tad skeptical. But still, that is a non intentional consequence. I have read many threads here where a hunter wounded a deer, did not recover it and felt badly about it. To the point of loosing sleep and even considering giving up hunting. Never see that posted from a wounded 'coon or 'yote. Just last week I saw where a mama coon had been hit on the road and scattered about her were the 6 small bodies of her babies, that did not understand she was dead. They too got hit before they had the chance to enjoy life. Odds are they would have died from starvation or depredation if they had not been hit, so one wonders.....did other drivers run them down on purpose to make the end come quicker? Still, I myself felt a sadness in my heart for them. While I have trapped and shot 'coons all of my life, I still wished mom would have made it across that road.
The truth is we all judge the value of a critter's life and decide how much suffering it deserves based on that value. Whether it's purely our opinion of it and the way it lives, its physical size or how much cost and effort is required to hunt it. I guess we all have to draw the line somewhere and live with the result.
Kinda the question asked by the OP. Do our hunting ethics change with the value or worth we put on an animal. How many folks try and make quick clean kills with every shot they take, or do they sometimes feel they need to punish that animal by making it suffer, because we feel it somehow has inconvenienced us. Do we gut shoot the wolf/coyote because we feel it may be the reason we did not get a deer this year, or do we take it in the same manner we would have taken a deer if given the chance? Sadly, I see this in many of the hunting threads on this forum. Does a deer than cost $10,000, shot over a bait pile, from a blind/stand placed by a outfitter/rancher deserve to die quicker than a meat doe shot in the back forty on a free bonus tag? One costs more, but in many cases the effort to take the doe is much more than the $10,000 pen raised deer, yes or no?
Teaching Hunter Safety, we discuss the 5 stages of a Hunter. This is basically the just of this thread. Which one are you? Which one is any of us?