Also organizations like hunting lodges put a lot of effort and money into wildlife conservation and wilderness preservation. There's a lot of natural habitat that is protected today specifically because of the work of groups of hunters. Without them that land would have been used for something else. It's obviously self-interested, but it benefits more than just them.

Chronic Wasting Disease is a particularly scary prion disease that is highly dependent on deer population density.

I agree but I do have a little issue with the "wasting resources" part, that's a very anthropocentric view to take. There's an entire ecosystem of organisms that would love to use those resources, and in many cases leaving the carcass behind is better for that system than taking it away and depleting it of that biomass. There's obviously a lot of "ifs" involved but I wouldn't generalise by saying that because a human didn't get to eat it the resource was "wasted".

It's unfortunate that our ancestors have left us with this kind of ecological trolley problem, where in order to keep the system balanced and prevent collapse we're obligated to go out and kill a lot of creatures, but such is the world we've inherited.

This relates to Britain, not the United States. Results will be different.

I’d argue that even if you waste everything from hunting deer, in most areas of the US fact their is now one less deer is definite ecological benefit all on its own.

A forest with a large deer population where people don’t landscape and fence every tree is going to become either a near monoculture with the only exceptions being invasive species. This is because deer eat most but not all native saplings before they can grow to the point they can survive a deer attack, and with most forests in the US having far, far higher populations than natural we get far fewer native trees than natural.

Normally anything like modern deer levels would have led to a population explosion of predators to keep them in check, but because most deer predators are far more vulnerable to human presence, activity, and historical control efforts than deer, which thrive in human dominated areas, the result has been significant damage to forests.

As such, anything like hunting that can lower the deer population back towards natural is very enthical as it doing far more to protect the forest than any number of newly planted saplings could ever do. Your mileage may very, all forests arn’t the same, check the ecology of your local forest before hunting to figure out what the forest needs more of and what it need less of, etc…

I wonder now, what happens to the results if you put the question about factory farming at either the beginning or the very end?

My guess is that when at the beginning, the percentages would shift significantly into the acceptable range because of the not wanting to look inconsistent.

It makes more sense as the survey was conducted on British adults.

I wonder if this odd result is from the question not specifying trophy hunting vs. food hunting. If you eat meat it wouldn't make sense to be against food hunting, but it would make sense if you think they're hunting deer just to hang a big antler head on your wall

1. It’s British adults, not Americans. Private gun ownership is uncommon-to-rare, and hunting even less so.
2. It’s British adults, so you need to read almost everything through the lens of classism and/or class jealousy. Most hunting in the UK is done by the upper class - there are genuine outdoorsmen hunting types but the norm is posh folk hunting for sport.

The headline says British adults so it's not going to be applicable outside Britain.

They're also quite intelligent and are likely to be extremely aware of their captive situation. It's basically slavery.

Note they merge 'somewhat unacceptable' and 'unacceptable' into the bars, which is.... a choice.

Dog races are worse than horse races, mostly because the dogs are trained to be more-or-less psychotic. Horses, you can see as understanding the competition they're in and being (at least mostly) willing participants.

The demographics sampled are adults from the UK.

I'm by no means a vegan, but it has always weirded me out how people see no problem of dragging an animal out of the water by using a hook in the animal's mouth. Even weirder is it when people then throw the fish back into the sea to be "ethical". It's just plain recreational torture at that point.