kevin1

Hunting isn't stressful when performed for recreation, it's a whole different ballgame when you have to do it to survive.

One could postulate that we'd all be better off as hunters than farmers, but without agriculture we wouldn't have the time to hunt for recreation, we also wouldn't have anywhere near the number of cool toys that we enjoy now. Think about it, if everybody hunted who would invent things like television, or Saturn 5 rockets? They wouldn't have time to do that since they'd be chasing their next deer steak. We also wouldn't have made any progress as a species, we'd still be at subsistence level like the rest of the animal kingdom. It's true that our proximity to each other promotes the spread of disease too, but how many of those diseases have we conquered, how many still kill us? It wasn't all that long ago that the words "measles" or "small pox" conjured images of plague and dread. Polio used to cripple millions, and prior to penicillin and the rest of the antibiotic family people routinely died in agony from simple wounds. Another thing to consider is this, could you really live like an Apache indiana from the early 19th century? Are you that good a hunter? Could you give up all you own, move to the wilderness and survive? Agriculture was the turning point for our species that took us to the pinnacle of the food chain, we are the apex predator of this planet.

Now dwell on that while you're making me a ham sammich, don't forget the cheese.