So for the meat hunters who choose to criticize trophy hunting, lets take a step back and examine what we're actually talking about. The meat hunter goes out and shoots his game animal. He might get "fun" out of it or he might not, that depends on his personality, but one wonders why anyone would consider big game hunting for sport, as opposed to subsistence hunting, if they didn't enjoy it. There is nothing morally wrong with a feeling of happiness at the end of a successful hunt. Its built into our DNA, and is necessary for survival in the natural world. We often hear of other predators that kill for fun, lions and wolves particularly; that drive to kill is what makes them successful. For the meat hunter, any legal animal will do, so his investment in time and money when he takes the first legal animal he sees, is obviously not as high as the trophy hunter who seeks a specific animal. It takes much less self discipline to take "Any Deer" as your license says, than to pass up animal after animal in the hopes that you find that special one before the season ends. And therein lies the greatest difference between hunting meat and hunting trophies: the difficulty, the cost, and the self discipline required to hunt a specific animal.
Another consideration is that meat hunting has a greater effect on game populations, than trophy hunting does. First off, by definition, trophy hunters take fewer animals out of any given population than meat hunters do, but additionally, because trophy animals are the oldest, they typically are non-breeding males, whose removal from the herd has no effect on the population. Now in fairness, the activity of meat hunters is an important form of predation as this predation stimulates optimal birth rates, and its those birth rates that guarantee the survival of the game population.
Meat hunters will sometimes point to the trophy hunter as being wasteful, where they themselves leave nothing for the other animals who depend on the death of that one to make a living. One of the wonders of African hunting is to see the appearance of huge numbers of gigantic storks and vultures soon after the butchering begins. You have to wonder, "How did they know?" Wastage is the cry of the anti, who would see the end to all hunting, not just trophy hunting. In the African context, the meat from trophies is used, A) for camp meat, B) used for lion or leopard bait, and C) divided up amongst the camp staff for their personal consumption. Some trophy meat is pretty rank, and would not be considered suitable fare for Westerners, trophy buffalo is a case in point.
In today's world, few people need to hunt in order to survive. Its far less expensive to go to Safeway than it is to hunt Dall Sheep in the Yukon. It is far less expensive to shop at Superstore than it is to hunt musk-ox in Nunavut, and it is far less expensive to shop at Wallmart than it is to hunt elephants in Botswana's Okavango Delta. So when the meat hunter criticizes the trophy hunter, its not about meat, you can get meat anywhere, and if not about meat, what is behind the criticism?