The Most Dangerous Game story as two major themes. The first one is reason vs. Instinct and The Effects of War.
On this excerpt, you can see that the theme is reason vs. instinct. The hunter thinks that hunting is a good sport even though it kills an animal that has no way of defending itself. The character Whitney defends that the jaguar has feelings, especially the fear of pain and being killed.
This way this character is used to blur differences between animals and humans, that both have the same feelings.
