We don’t all use the same yardstick in measuring the ethicallity of our actions, of course, and this particular question brings those differences into high relief. To those who hold the Bible to be the ultimate ethical standard, meat eating gets an unqualified pass (although Seventh Day Adventists would disagree).
On the secular side, people point to the “natural order of things” as an ethical justification, saying that by hunting and eating meat we’re simply doing what other top predators do, and that our physiology points to our destiny as omnivores.
I won’t try to counter those arguments here though it wouldn’t take much urging to get me to, but I feel drawn to a different ethical standard. I see ethics as inseparable from compassion. It’s our ability to understand the suffering of other beings, and to want to minimize that suffering, that underlies our concern for ethics.
By this measure, to violate our sense of compassion not only brings more suffering to others, but confuses our own internal sense of right and wrong. For compassion to be a reliable ethical guide, we have to be sensitive to its urgings. The more attentive we are to it, the more unambiguous it becomes. But every time we justify our way around its urgings, the voice of compassion grows fainter.
Whenever we have a choice not to make another sentient being suffer, I think we choose not to. We don’t always have that choice, granted, but we need to be honest with ourselves in deciding whether or not that choice exists. Raising and slaughtering animals for food will always cause some suffering, and can cause a great deal of suffering. At some point in that process, our natural voice of compassion has to get ignored. Sport hunting not only causes suffering, but turns the occasion of that suffering into a source of gratification for the hunter, which is doubly damaging.