Peter Singer's Utilitarian Theory On The Ethical Treatment Of Non-Human Animals

In the film, "Louis Theroux's African Hunting Party", South African wild game farmers advocate trophy hunting as a necessary activity for saving certain species from inevitable extinction due to illegal wildlife poaching. However, when considering Peter Singer's utilitarian theory on the ethical treatment of non-human animals, the process of shooting and killing an animal to preserve its species seems counterintuitive. Applying Singer's perspective, my position is that trophy hunting is morally unacceptable as it reasserts speciesism by disregarding the suffering of the animals being murdered for sport. Indeed, the act of purchasing a hunting permit so that a person may kill an animal for its material value dismisses the animal's personhood. Also, the desire to take a photograph with its dead body and mutilate its carcass so that it may become a 'trophy' completely undermines Singer's principle of equality, wherein the individual's best interests are taken into account to ensure that each being is treated humanely. Singer argues that the principle of equality should be extended to non-human animals as the main qualifier for ethical treatment is sentience, and since

Wild game farmers and hunters are speciesists because they do not consider the interests of the sentient beings they come into contact with; instead, they view them as beasts who are incapable of feeling. In fact, they approach these animals as subordinate to human beings for their inability to converse and reason, however, they fail to notice that like humans, animals have an inherent evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce and, as is evident by their instinct to run whenever they hear a gun shot, they are aware of their need to