I don't think it's appropriate to call that "sporting chance" - for the deer this is not a sport, it's a very serious life or death situation, where they'd very much rather not be.

Yes-ish. But "sporting chance" may be a way for the hunter to say that wants his recreational pastime to be difficult enough to be interesting to him. Or that he is repelled by the idea of using really modern drone & firearms technology, and slaughter-at-scale.

That does not leave us any conversation to have that is appropriate to HN though.

They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.

If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.