Roadkill vs Hunting ?
This might be super niche irl discourse, and it kinda doesn't matter. but, so, there's a lot of folks I know who will only eat meat if it's roadkill, and are otherwise vegan or vegetarian or whatever, like they won't eat hunted meat or locally farmed meat. and don't get me wrong, i'm all for eating roadkill. and i'm not like, against choosing one over the other, i mean, i think eating roadkill but not hunted food is a perfectly fine and neutral personal choice. of course, i think it is good for animals killed on the road to go to human use when possible.
but also, for reasons, i feel the need to acknowledge that this is not a morally superior practice to hunting or fishing or even localized animal farming/butchering. again, i think it is a neutral choice to eat roadkill but not locally farmed or hunted meat. but, roadkill is still killed by human actions, it's not like, absolved of the animal's death.
i know folks who will eat bowhunted animals and roadkill, but not gun hunted animals, because they see gun hunting as an unfair advantage. eat what you feel good about eating, but, i think cars are an equally unfair advantage? i just don't see the difference.
i've heard folks say that roadkill is better because, with hunting, we go into their space and kill them, but with roadkill, it's their fault for wandering into our space. i don't think there is animal space and human space, and i don't think the animals think that either. i think they tend to stay away from us because we're dangerous, but that's not the same as us somehow owning this part of the land more than they do.
i've heard people say roadkill is better because the human didn't intend to kill the animal, it was just an accident. and that ...almost makes sense to me? but, i guess i just don't believe that intent matters so much when a thing is killed. i also, and maybe this is the difference, don't believe it is morally wrong for a human to kill an animal it intends to make use of. i actually personally believe that intentionally killing an animal for the purpose of using it as a resource is better than negligently or accidentally killing it. cars don't stop being weapons just because they're normalized in a nonviolent context. like baseball bats.
i just, what's the idea here? 'it's not wrong to eat meat, it's just wrong to kill it on purpose'? it's a fallacy to think that there is any meat that isn't killed by direct human action. it has to be killed to be eaten, it's killed either way, the death is still violent-- and actually rather moreso-- when it's a result of the car industry. eating meat means the animal had to die, full stop. violence is not only violence when it's intentional. there's something i'm failing to articulate here.
maybe this belief is of the mindset that roadkill is unavoidable and hunting isn't? i guess i feel like that is both passive toward the car industry, as if in its 'inevitability' it can be folded into nature more than subsistence hunting can, and i feel like it's ignorant toward the nature, necessity, positivity and beauty of intentional hunting and localized farming.
there's no moral superiority in making the most of a death that was unintentional, a death that involved more suffering, a death out of control-- it's dead. the death is a death either way. hunting is not wrong for harvesting a resource in an intentional way that minimizes suffering. the death is a death either way. humans caused it either way.
this is not to imply that hunting is better than eating roadkill, again, a choice between the two is neutral. it's just to say that maybe roadkill is not a passive, morally absolving form of enacting death. it's not a driver's fault, of course, it's just what happens when we rely so heavily on cars. i guess my point is, roadkill is a victim of the human car industry, not some kind of natural death, and there's something i don't like about removing oneself from the mortal implications of it all, naturalizing car death while ostracizing the nature of hunting.
yes, to utilize roadkill is to make use of an unfortunate death. and that is good! using roadkill is good! but just because the death was an unfortunate byproduct of another bad industry, and not the point of it, does not make it less a result of human hands.
idk. that's all to say, eating and using roadkill is great! and so is hunting! so is subsistence farming! fuck industrialized meat but hell if we ain't omnivorous mammals; there just ain't no way to be that without killing.
