And say that, in general, I favor hunting, including of predators. Maybe it's because I'm from Michigan where hunting is seriously a thing, but I digress...
We are highly evolved, true. But we are still animals in the food chain whether we accept it or not. It is far more natural to kill an animal to consume, than it is to raise them in massive numbers in squalid conditions and then buy the meat that has conveniently neatly packaged by someone else. Furthermore, our highly evolved intellect allows and causes us to precisely and quickly kill the animal, which is a far more peaceful end than many animals get at the hands (paws?) of non-human predators.
Polluting the world with massive amounts of toxic runoff, shredding forests, warming the globe, stacking up fucking nuclear waste, killing oceans, are not natural things, unless you consider anything that results from our highly evolved intellects to be natural by default...But when we are participating in the food chain we are in nature, part of it. Yes, using tools such as firearms gives us a serious edge, and you could make the argument that doing so means we've stepped out of the circle of nature. I would say that we are using our intellect in the way nature intended, seeking to mitigate our disadvantages in the face of the advantages other critters have over us. Perhaps I'm not being consistent with the thesis of this paragraph, perhaps I'm drawing an artificial line...These points are, of course, up for debate.
The hunting of bears seems to outrage far more people than the hunting of, say, whitetail deer. There are fewer black bear than whitetail deer, but their numbers are high enough to support controlled hunting. What I think is the real reason that so many more people are outraged about the killing of bears is because something about bears appeals to us. We like the way they look. We admire their strength. They amuse us when the walk on two legs. We place more value on bear than deer, and more value on bears that walk on two legs than on regular old bears. Animals kill to survive. Not wantonly, but they kill nonetheless. We are animals. We're on the food chain.
And of course there are the practical aspects, such as you simply can't have powerful predators running around densely populated areas. This is also natural -- prides of lions, packs of wolves, bears, all do what they can to protect their territory from other predators.
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