Hunting

Hunting is the practice of pursuing animals for food, recreation, or trade. In modern use, the term refers to regulated and legal hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of animals contrary to law. more...

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Hunted animals are referred to as game animals, and are usually large or small mammals, migratory gamebirds, or non-migratory gamebirds.

By definition, hunting excludes the killing - though similar techniques may be used - of individual protected animals, such as bears which have become dangerous to humans, as well as the killing of non-game animals, domestic animals, or vermin as a means of pest control. Hunting advocates claim that hunting can be a necessary component of modern wildlife management, for example to help maintain a population of healthy animals within an environment's ecological carrying capacity when natural checks such as predators are absent. In the United States, wildlife managers are frequently part of hunting regulatory and licensing bodies, where they help to set rules on the number, manner and conditions in which game may be hunted.

The pursuit, capture and release, or capture for food of fish is called fishing, which is not commonly categorized as a kind of hunting. Trapping is also usually considered a separate activity. Neither is it considered hunting to pursue animals without intent to take them, as in wildlife photography or birdwatching. The practice of hunting for plants or mushrooms is a colloquial term for gathering.

History

Ancient roots

Hunting has an extremely long history and may well pre-date the rise of species Homo sapiens. While our earliest primate ancestors were probably insectivores, there is evidence that we have used larger animals for subsistence for up to 1.8 million years and that hunting may have been one of the multiple environmental factors leading to replacement of holocene megafauna by smaller herbivores. The North American megafauna extinction was coincidental with the Younger Dryas impact event, making hunting a less critical factor in prehistoric species loss than had been previously thought.

Hunting was a crucial component of hunter-gatherer societies before the domestication of animals and the dawn of agriculture. There is fossil evidence for spear use in Asian hunting dating from approximately 16,200 years ago.

With the establishment of language and culture, hunting became a theme of stories and myths, as well as proverbs, aphorisms, adages and metaphors which continue even today.

Many species of animals have been hunted and caribou/wild reindeer \"may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting.\"

Read more at Wikipedia.org