Re: Are there any animals besides man that kill for sport?

This is quite a diffcult question to answer.
First problem: what do you understand as "kill for sport"?

So what do we define as "kill for sport" or other recreational reasons. I would like to define it here - just to have a basis - as hunting not out of need of food. This is a quite far reaching inclusive definition. We could find many examples there hunting and killing done by humans might not be sport or recreation.

If we use this definition, however, all hunting in America is killing for sport. No human really needs to hunt and kill because he or she would starve to death otherwise. On average, hunting is much more expensive (equipment, licences, travel and transport, storage) than just to buy the meat in a supermarket.

That brings the question down to: "Is there any animal that kills, but not for food?
Yes there are. Even a well fed cat might find pleasure in hunting and killing a mouse, while its onwner knows this same cat would never eat a mouse. The same is true for dogs. Also here killing happens regularly (in rare cases even humans are killed) and certainly not in need of food. I once got a report of bears catching salmon traveling upstream. These bears did not stop catching salmon even after the point when they could not eat anything anymore. Have you ever heared about the fox who killed all hens in a stable, much more than he possibly could eat? What about the spider that catches more flies than it can eat right now, packs them up and stores them, but forgets about these reserves because new food comes into the net.

So yes, if we accept the above definition, we have to accept that most predators species also kill in some cases not for food, and with that they kill for "sport".

With all that note that I did not say one word about this behavior as good or bad. Good or bad are irrelevant for evolution, there are no moral rules that can be deduced from evolution.

Hope that answers your question.
greetings J. Ziesmann