This Saturday, half the population of every small town in Wisconsin will be out of their homes by 5 a.m. The same will be true Sunday, though a good portion of them will do so with hangovers. Why? This weekend is the statewide opening of gun season for whitetail deer. In lieu of this annual Wisconsin tradition, I offer a simple fill in the blank.

Inflicting pain and death on a living thing capable of suffering is justified when _____.

Yes, that’s right, this is an opinion piece relating to the moral standing of animals. But, don’t go away yet, or dismiss me as some crazy hippie who talks about how everything in the universe is connected or throws fake blood on people.

What I am arguing for is a view based on animal welfare, not animal rights. The distinction is not mere semantics. On the animal welfare side of the debate lie the views of most veterinarians, agriculturalists and scientists familiar with the issue. On the other side are the people cutting down fences to let llamas run free into the Wisconsin wilderness. The underlying idea is simple: The welfare of animals should be taken seriously, but not because they have rights.

So let’s return to our previous fill-in-the-blank question. While many people would correctly fill in the blank with “necessary,” I venture to believe very few people would do so with “completely unnecessary.” This is a matter of human intuition. When we feel disgusted with a person who viciously kicks or kills a dog for no reason, that is essentially what we express — that we are against the unnecessary infliction of pain or death on a living thing capable of suffering.

This assessment is, of course, a bit shortsighted. The person kicking or killing a dog may very well have a reason to do so; namely, they may get some sick kind of pleasure from it. What we are really saying when we morally condemn them is that the reasons that person may have do not possibly justify his actions.

It seems obvious to me that deer hunters who kill for sport fit the same bill.

When a person kills a deer for nothing more than the sake of sport, they fill in the blank of our previously posed question with “when it gives me entertainment or pleasure.” That is the exact same answer the person who kicked or killed a dog would give. But the deer hunter who attempts to justify his actions rarely does so on the grounds of sport, hopefully because of how clearly morally abhorrent such reasoning is. So other justifications are attempted, nearly all of which fail equally as much.

The most common of such justifications is also my favorite: deer hunting is a time-honored tradition. There is one way to describe the relevance of tradition or convention in moral assessment: irrelevant. Moral evil perpetrated in the past does nothing to justify it in the future. Convention simply does not work here.

A column in this very paper a few years ago encouraged us to take part in that year’s hunt because it would supposedly be good for the environment. Of course, the green revolution has taught us the number of ways to help or improve our environment is nearly limitless. When alternatives exist that could accomplish the same goal but do not involve killing living things, they should clearly be preferred. I mention this specific justification not because I think it is especially persuasive to any number of people, but, more importantly, because I think a similar response probably applies to almost all practical justifications given for deer hunting.

Save perhaps one. It cannot be denied that an oversized deer herd can cause damage to property and crops. A real answer to whether preventing this is a proper justification for hunting them ourselves requires a much more developed theory on the moral standing of animals than can be given here.

At any rate, I have yet to meet a hunter who is motivated to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning out of sheer dedication to the property of people throughout the state whom they have never met. So, this justification, if it is held (and I’m skeptical that it does), would affect the debate on a minute scale.

For those of you who just don’t buy any of this, I would ask you to think about your own interests. Even the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held the crackpot view that animals were nothing more than machines, acknowledged that to wantonly harm and kill animals actually hurts us. It destroys our ability to empathize with the suffering of the other things that inhabit this planet.

It also reflects poorly on us, not just because we continue to engage in such immoral traditions, but because we seem unable to conduct a public discussion on the issue that is free of the poisons of empty, emotional rhetoric and uninformed arguments. If changing the nature of our discourse comes first, changing the nature of our actions should follow.

Alec Slocum ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.