We don't need to hunt to subsist when we can exist on a plant-based diet.

Yes and no. The point I was trying to make isn’t that we need meat to survive, but that the cultural landscape (where we also grow our plant-based food) has been reshaped by us to such an extent that natural regulatory processes no longer function or are no longer sufficient to maintain balance. `

Personally, I'm not OK with getting eaten by a tiger or a boa constrictor, so I totally undersand why people would want to eliminate human predators. `

You’ve raised a point here that I think I can use to illustrate my point quite well: I live in Central Europe, and one of the wild species found here that is heavily hunted is the wild boar. Wild boars are normally (if we focus solely on predators and set aside bad weather and epidemics) regulated mainly by wolves and perhaps, to a certain extent, by brown bears. The problem is that our modern cultural landscape offers the adaptable wild boars much more food than they would naturally find: In the spring (during the nursing season), there are many available meadows where they can root for mice, earthworms, and other small creatures; then in the summer, first the milk-ripe grain, then the fully ripe grain, followed by corn well into the fall; and then, due to climate change, one bumper crop year after another (which, of course, occurs less frequently). The result is population growth rates of up to 200%. So we would also need a much higher density of wolves and brown bears to regulate the populations in the same way as in a natural system. I dare to doubt whether this is possible, or, given the potential for encounters between wolves and humans, even desirable, in metropolitan areas and lowlands without sufficient forest cover.

I therefore believe that we cannot do without some form of human regulation (whether through hunting or some other method), since we rely on exploiting these systems in a non-natural way.