Hunting is the practice pursuing animals to kill them for food, recreation, or trade of their products. In modern use, the term refers to regulated and legal hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of animals contrary to law. Hunted animals are referred to as game animals, and are usually large mammals or migratory birds.

By definition, hunting strictly speaking excludes killing of individual animals that have become dangerous to humans and the killing of non-game animals, domestic animals, or vermin as a means of pest control. Hunting may be a component of modern wildlife management, sometimes used to help maintain a population of healthy animals within an environment's ecological carrying capacity. Wildlife managers are frequently part of hunting regulatory and licensing bodies, where they help to set rules on the number, manner and conditions in which game may be hunted or "harvested."

Hunting can be an important tool for wildlife management. Hunting gives resource managers a valuable tool to control populations of some species that might otherwise exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat and threaten the well-being of other wildlife species, and in some instances, that of human health and safety.

Hunting reduces the annual crop of new animals and birds to allow the remaining animals sufficient feed and shelter to survive. Some environmentalists assert that introducing appropriate predator animals would achieve the same benefit with more efficiency and less environmental impact, but some livestock owners disagree, seeing human killing as more explicitly selective.

Animal management authorities sometimes rely on hunting to control certain animal populations. These hunts are sometimes carried out by professional hunters although other hunts include amateurs. Overpopulations of deer in urban parks might be hunted by animal management authorities.