Personally, I don't like the food chain as it creates the maximum amount of pain. We presume that plants do not suffer pain although plants sprayed with herbicides shrivel up and look to me as if they are in pain. If I designed the universe, however, I wouldn't have developed the food chain and would have invented another way to keep populations in check.
But we have the food chain and it is, unfortunately, alive and well, and human beings most definitely have their eyes in the front of their heads. So human beings with their ability to rationalize became the biggest predator of all. In fact it goes beyond that. We kill some animals not for food but just for their furs, for example, or their tusks. Since we are predator animals, it is not surprising with our ability to reason that we developed increasingly efficient methods of killing other animals: from stampeding animals over a cliff, to spears, to the bow and arrow of several kinds, to guns. We have to face it, hunting is in our nature, even if you or I don't do it, and there are even large societies that do not eat meat (e.g. most Hindus.). A Hindu told me many years ago, that they do not like the idea of eating even plants, but we have to eat something and vegetation is the path of least pain..
I like to think that domesticated animals for food are killed in a painless way, but I don't really know this to be true. Certainly having them penned up in confined spaces is not humane. The problem of hunting with guns is that we can kill animals into extinction (e.g. the passenger pigeon is a common example). The elephant, for example, may be close to extinction although it is hunted only for its tusks. But human beings are a part of nature and driving animals to extinction seems to be a part of the design of things.
I like to think that domesticated animals for food are killed in a painless way, but I don't really know this to be true. Certainly having them penned up in confined spaces is not humane. The problem of hunting with guns is that we can kill animals into extinction (e.g. the passenger pigeon is a common example). The elephant, for example, may be close to extinction although it is hunted only for its tusks. But human beings are a part of nature and driving animals to extinction seems to be a part of the design of things.
Since hunting is in our nature, the point of all this is that I have come to the conclusion that human beings should be allowed to hunt to a reasonable extent and doing so with guns is unavoidable in our society. After all we even like to shoot each other. We even like to shoot ourselves, but I don't like those who want to commit suicide to take others down with them, in many cases just because they are handy.*
Of course, hunting is not the only way human being drive animals into extinction. We also do it by expanding our communities and take away the animal habitat. Thus some animals, like deer for example, seem to have adopted, and you can see them running around to urban communities. When they adopt to urbanization, they become a nuisance to us and we want to get rid of them. Many people who find deer to be beautiful still don't want them eating the foliage in their garden.
The prey animal population (e.g. elk) of Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho was getting out of hand because of the loss of predator animals so they reintroduced wolves (http://www.nps.gov/yell/naturescience/wolfrest.htm). Frankly, I think I would rather be killed by a bullet than a wolf though I have never tried either.
* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-aftermath-of-firearm-newton-ct.html
* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-aftermath-of-firearm-newton-ct.html
