While we are standing away. Do we need to consider hunting as a bioethical issue?

Abstract

How could we understand the phenomenon of hunting today? If we consider bioethics as the
emerging area through which we want to give meaning to the role of human being towards
his/her societal dimension as well as to all forms of life, it seems reasonable to assume that
phenomenon of hunting should not stay out of our considerations. In the beginning we are
faced with two very ambivalent positions: even though human was 90% of his/her history
a hunter and gatherer, today hunting seems unnecessary rudiment of the past, since the
hunting activity is understood as expression of direct killing and the supremacy of man over
many life forms. But at the same time hunting is one of the most successful tools to control
the population of certain animal species, which as a result of human intervention has come
into a situation of imbalance. In addition, many theorists suggest contemporary lifestyle
of post-industrial society in many ways denaturalize human while destroying the natural
dimension of human existence, reducing it to a cognitive and sensitive flawed creature. Here
we refer to the idea of the Spanish philosopher J. Ortega y Gasset who, in his famous writings
Meditations on Hunting, wants to reach the deepest sense of the human being, and says that
the hunting was that retrieving mechanism. In the end, in this bioethical survey we try to
outline the problematic area of hunting while determining the appropriate measure of its
existence within contemporary society.