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If you don't know what an ethical kill means, look it up before you spout some stupid shit. Knowing where to place a shot is the difference between a humane death for the deer and days, if not weeks if not months or years of suffering, starvation amd freezing. A 1 year old deer has very very very few predators. Its why every state tracks the deer taken each year and release the amount of tags the following year accordingly in order to maintain a healthy population for deer to prosper. Every deer that isn't killed during hunting season will most likely only die when struck by a car, causing exponentially more problems accross the board without even considering the wasted meat. I eat venison in place of beef approx 9 months of every year when I take 1 deer during bow season and 1 deer during firearm season. Saving me hundreds if not thousands in grocery bills every single year.

Overpopulation is a massive threat to deer populations due to a lack of natural predators. This leads to reduced health of individual deer, starvation, and outbreaks of disease. Chronic Wasting Disease has become an epidemic, and it's a truly awful way to go. It's to the point state's wildlife management departments are begging for more hunters to control the population.

Nature isn't "nice", it's ruthless and demands balance. Each deer you take helps maintain that balance.

Is a death in an minute really that depressing compared to death by starvation, CWD, or being torn apart slowly by predators?

Animals eat animals. Humans are animals. We are not removed from nature. We are very much part of the ecosystem and have been since homosapiens as a species and every proto human before us.

Responsible hunting is beneficial for the environment, especially in areas where we irrevocably already fucked the environment by removing all of the predator species such as bears and wolves. The deer would overpopulate and destroy the environment like locusts without something (us or predators) to keep them in check.

Essentially, our hands are already muddied from the environmental atrocities of generations before us. Stopping would make it worse at this point. For example, in my hometown, fishermen are required by law to kill invasive species of fish that came from freighter ships from Asia. They have no natural predator and are therefore exhuasting the resources for the native species and driving them to near extinction. If we simply backed off now, the native species would likely go extinct from starvation and predation. We can't make it exactly how it was before, but we can make it better.

That being said, I'm all in for meat alternatives and cultured meats. Less farmland for inhumane & inefficient meat farming that can instead be returned to nature, and reintroduce predators into those reclaimed areas so hunting is not required to keep prey populations in check. It would be wonderful to live in a world where eating animals is not necessary, wild or domesticated.

And of course, the ultimate over all caveat: This is all simplifications and environmental rectification is extremely complex and varies from location to location. In some locations, yep, the answer really is just "leave the animals alone".

Deer are literal pests they need to be hunted in order to keep the population down

You do realize that hunters generally target older bucks that wouldn’t have many years of life left anyway? Getting shot by a hunter is, by far, one of the quickest and most painless ways for it to die. The alternatives are usually much worse - starvation, disease, or being eaten alive by a predator.

Here's a playlist for you of how that looks like. Nature at it's finest with no human intervention. Enjoy.