In the USA, deer kill 150 people per year. This occurs in automobile collisions and the deer are also always killed. (One ran into my truck and caused $7,000 damage. I wasn't seriously injured but I had a whiplash headache until the next morning. It was like being T-boned by a Harley.) Actually, the last I heard, bison were the most deadly animal in America. I'm sure quite a few of these deaths are auto collisions, but bison can also be very aggressive and simply attack people.
In any case, if you want to talk about the morality of eating meat (and let me first say that I am an unrepentant carnivore), I don't see a lot of difference between killing the animal yourself versus letting some farmer or slaughterhouse worker kill it for you. The animal is just as dead. In fact, unless it's a kosher/halal slaughterhouse, whose methods are utterly barbaric (the animal has to bleed to death!), farm animals are likely to die more quickly and humanely and less painfully than game animals that are killed by hunters. Not all of those guys are really good shots, and even if they are, every shot is not lucky. The animal may suffer in pain for a while as the hunter hikes over to give it the
coup de grace. In fact it may be able to limp away and elude the final bullet, in which case it may suffer for hours or days until a bear, coyote, cougar or other opportunistic predator takes over.
Furthermore, today's American "factory farms" are cruel enough to turn your stomach. Animals literally have no room to turn around. The citizens of California have already passed an initiative measure as the first step toward giving them more mobility and comfort. And as California goes, the nation eventually goes. (Who can forget Ronald Reagan?
)
If you're gonna eat meat, some animal is gonna die so you can be fed. The details seem strangely irrelevant from this perspective, so long as cruelty is not practiced, deliberately or negligently. So fellow carnivores, why don't we put more effort into ending the cruelty, or at least for starters, mitigating it?