Especially one’s where an animal is not specifically killed for that product.
You pose an interesting, yet potentially controversial question. I’m like waste not, want not. People are gonna eat meat, whether you think that’s ethical or not. So, why waste the hides?
I grew up in a town filled with hunters, though I wasn’t exactly much of a hunter myself. Though I did go out with them a couple times around age 13, and we killed, cooked and ate a couple rabbits.
What my elders taught me, is if you hunt, don’t do it for sport, you better eat what you kill. And if at all possible, don’t let anything go to waste.
And that’s about when I was taught to preserve animal hide with borax and dry curing.
Personally I feel like hunting is a lot better than just buying meat at a grocery store or whatever. If you hunt in a way that respects the death of the animal and doesn’t waste anything then you at least are much more connected to what consuming meat actually entails. A big reason I became vegan in the first place was because I fished a few times growing up, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t like it because it felt cruel. Eventually I realized that if I wasn’t even willing to fish because I felt bad about it, why is consuming animal products any more acceptable to me?
I still could never bring myself to hunt, and I do 100% take issue with hunting for sport where it doesn’t respect the life of the animal. But if you hunt just what you need, and use everything you can from the animal, then at least you feel the gravity that the act of taking a life should cause you to feel imo.
