I mean, if we're talking about analyzing the morality of killing, there seems to be something fundamentally missing here. Basically, I don't think analyzing things in terms of pleasure/pain is the way to go. Like, if we were talking about killing a person that wouldn't be the way to analyze it, right? There, I would conceive of the primary harm not so much in terms of causing *pain* but rather in terms of *thwarting* the person, preventing them from accomplishing their goals. (See also this LW post of mine: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWJ5kzeqvx4kvB527/goal-thinking-vs-desire-thinking ) I realize not everyone would agree with me on this, but I think that's the better way to think of things!
Now, animals aren't people, so it may make sense to take a different stance towards them, or at least some or most of them. Still, I think it is at least worth mentioning the issue.
A consideration that moves me in the direction of thinking that hunting is probably net-positive for animal welfare is that in many areas large carnivores have been locally extirpated, so most of the animals that are hunted would otherwise have their populations expand until they ate all the food. I think this would result in either a Malthusian equilibrium being reached or the population undergoing a boom and bust cycle every time it eats all the available food. Starvation, as you say, sounds far more painful than getting shot. Therefore I think that vegetarians have little reason to refrain from eating hunted meat in places where some of the downward pressure on prey animal populations is exercised by human hunters. I posted about this one my blog a couple of times (https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2021/12/22/meat-eating-for-vegetarians/https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/response-to-z-b-on-hunting/).
It seems like you're treating animal pain and suffering as bad and happiness as good, but death itself as neutral. Lengthening a happy animal's life is good, and shortening an unhappy animal's life is good. But this is pretty different from how we treat humans; we see a human death as bad, even if their life was unhappy. We might in rare circumstances think it it's ok to kill a human if they were experiencing extreme suffering, but we certainly don't treat human death as neutral. Why the difference?
I mean, if we're talking about analyzing the morality of killing, there seems to be something fundamentally missing here. Basically, I don't think analyzing things in terms of pleasure/pain is the way to go. Like, if we were talking about killing a person that wouldn't be the way to analyze it, right? There, I would conceive of the primary harm not so much in terms of causing *pain* but rather in terms of *thwarting* the person, preventing them from accomplishing their goals. (See also this LW post of mine: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWJ5kzeqvx4kvB527/goal-thinking-vs-desire-thinking ) I realize not everyone would agree with me on this, but I think that's the better way to think of things!
Now, animals aren't people, so it may make sense to take a different stance towards them, or at least some or most of them. Still, I think it is at least worth mentioning the issue.
A consideration that moves me in the direction of thinking that hunting is probably net-positive for animal welfare is that in many areas large carnivores have been locally extirpated, so most of the animals that are hunted would otherwise have their populations expand until they ate all the food. I think this would result in either a Malthusian equilibrium being reached or the population undergoing a boom and bust cycle every time it eats all the available food. Starvation, as you say, sounds far more painful than getting shot. Therefore I think that vegetarians have little reason to refrain from eating hunted meat in places where some of the downward pressure on prey animal populations is exercised by human hunters. I posted about this one my blog a couple of times (https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2021/12/22/meat-eating-for-vegetarians/ https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/response-to-z-b-on-hunting/).
It seems like you're treating animal pain and suffering as bad and happiness as good, but death itself as neutral. Lengthening a happy animal's life is good, and shortening an unhappy animal's life is good. But this is pretty different from how we treat humans; we see a human death as bad, even if their life was unhappy. We might in rare circumstances think it it's ok to kill a human if they were experiencing extreme suffering, but we certainly don't treat human death as neutral. Why the difference?