Leopards Ate My Face

Is that an Epic Rap Battles reference in the wild?

Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race, I don't hunt or care to start hunting and if recreational hunting is more detrimental to sustained ecosystems than other tactics then it should be replaced, I'm more concerned with using good, reliable information to form conclusions

The first and third link doesn't appear to link to any citations or data to support it's claims, so I think it's fair to treat it as an option piece but I think we should have better standards when making decisions that can affect our stewardship of the world around us

The second is quite long but from what I can gather it is the best of the 4 in that it is based on a survey of peer reviewed research and makes a good thorough case against a subset of recreational hunting, specifically trophy hunting, as unethical.

The last link says overabundance is not a scientific term used in the scientific literature, but I can clearly see it is in many widely cited research papers (two usages, one in linguistics and one in biology)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=overabundant

And in the additional resources section there's a few broken links and the closest I can find to a peer review article is a letter to the editor of a journal, not identified as a peer reviewed article and without public access to the methodology if it contains one

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304380005003339

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_Letter_to_the_Editor_considered_as_research_article_publication_Does_it_carry_any_value_in_terms_of_research_score

I live in a country (not US) that has been isolated from many countries for millions of years and had many invasive species introduced by humans in the past few hundred.

These invasive species have devastated local/native wildlife and grown to ridiculous levels. If humans did nothing to stop them, including hunting them, they would completely take over and extinct many more species than they already have, reducing diversity.

Not stopping them, again which includes hunting and trapping, would be amoral and worse for the planet

You didn't even read paper that you linked.

The only credible source that is well cited is the paper about the Consequences of recreational hunting for biodiversity conservation and livelihoods, and it explicitly states that recreational hunting (aka trophy hunting) is NOT subsistence or commercial hunting.

This paper's focus is on evaluating the dubious claims about conservation that recreational hunters uses to justify themselves. It is criticizing the same that I was criticizing, which is that there is no justifiable excuse for trophy hunting.

You linked a bunch of random vegan sites, so I assume you're vegan. Look, I get it. Eating and killing animals is fucked up. But you're barking up the wrong tree here. Subsistence hunters, which most deer hunters are, are causing far less animal suffering than the vast majority of people who eat factory farmed animals.

I'm not going to pretend I'm vegan because I'm not, but I have cut down meat consumption by 75%. If you want to make a real difference, you'll find that telling everyone to eat 10% less meat is far easier than telling 10% of the world to become vegan. If you actually give a shit about animals, do what works, not what feels good to yourself. Remember that humans grow up in an environment that culturally enforced and prizes meat consumption. Remember that not everywhere and everyone has good access to vegan alternatives.