To harvest an animal (2025)

Hello everybody in this forum. In the past week I have read a couple of articles where they use this term, to “harvest an animal”. For instance, one article read that “it is illegal to harvest white sharks in Australia”. What do they mean with “harvest”? Is it just keeping the animal alive, or they mean hunting and killing the animal? I appreciate everybody for their help.

To my mind, "harvesting" always implies putting the "harvestee" into the human food chain.

I agree with SDG that harvest is certainly used with fish and game, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's common. Government agencies and researchers use this term quite often, particularly when they need to talk about fairly large numbers (such as the "deer harvest" during the 2012 deer hunting season). But regular people in their regular conversation generally do not.

"Harvest" is a euphemism. It sounds as if the animal is a crop and crops are unfeeling and for food/other uses. By the use of "harvest", which has pleasant connotations, it is hoped that emotion will be removed from wholesale slaughter - it seems to work.

It should be added that I've always seen the word used with the plural when referring to animals (as opposed to plants). I've never heard or read of harvesting a single deer, or oyster, or shark.

Although the term might offend some folks, note that inference is that one is dealing with a renewable resource rather than annihilating it.

Some additional context could be helpful. Googling "white shark harvest" images reveals that Great White Shark is also the name of a variety of marijuana plant which apparently yields bountiful harvests I think this is just coincidence....