Joking aside, how many critters of any kind have you killed? Not including insects, as I doubt they have a consciousness, or pain receptors…I’m sure someone on here will put me right on that. I can count them on one hand, and the last one was over 30 years ago. Am I risking getting out of practice here, and somehow suffering for my shortcomings?
I don’t think I’ve ever killed a vertebrate. I don’t think I’d be overly squeamish about it, but I certainly wouldn’t enjoy it.
Actually, I think you just have to be rich. The professionals are there not just to find the animals for the customer, but to keep the customer alive and finish off any wounded animals.
And (although the evidence is somewhat disputed) it does look as though the only way to keep some species from extinction is to make sure the locals can make money from them. Given that e.g. elephants are massively destructive pests for the local community, and that culling will almost certainly be necessary anyway, licenced commercial hunting seems to be a bit of a no-brainer irrespective of one’s personal moral stance on the subject.
Were. Like the domesticated dog, our predatory instincts have been whittled down due to redundancy.
People are predators. It is simply part of our DNA, rather much like wandering around and exploring.
While the OP might take exception to hunting as a sport, it is part of every culture I have ever run into. (Do Hindus hunt?) To judge every culture in the world by your personal standards is at best to fail to understand most other human beings, or at best to simply feel so superior to them as to hold their cultures in contempt.
Cultures don’t hunt; individuals, and groups hunt. I have already stated my objection is to those individuals or groups that hunt for leisure or pleasure. Funnily enough, I do see myself as superior to them, but perhaps I am deceiving myself!
:dubious: Every dog I have dealt with for any period of time has needed extensive training to overcome its predatory instincts, and even then there is no guarantee that it won’t be momentarily overcome and kill something small and fluffy. I think you have an excessively rose-tinted view of dog and human nature.
Predatory instincts tend to be governed by extreme hunger. You try teaching your average mutt to do what a dedicated gun-dog or retriever has been encouraged to do as soon as it is old enough. Your average dog would not go hunting if it was well fed, true or false?
I think there is a lot of truth in this. No one simply trudges off into the brush to shoot whatever he wishes. It is very regulated - and a big business. In fact, one of the best “justifications” would probably be that a portion of the costs of an approved hunt goes to the protection of other animals.
As for the cost: this site has the costs for some “canned” hunts.
Other sites suggest that even less offensive hunts are not cheap - could easily run $10K and up whether hunting kudu in Africa or bighorn sheep in the Rockies.
Yeah probably. A couple of billion people over a couple of hundred thousand years think one way, and you the other. Not proof, but an indication.
False. Utterly. Dogs like hunting and killing things that are smaller than they are, and even sometimes bigger than they are, and hunger has nothing to do with it. Our dachshund would happily scoff his doggy biscuits and canned food, then head off to spend the afternoon digging up and killing voles. One of my mother’s terriers took time out from a hike to kill a half-grown rabbit, carry it three miles until we stopped for lunch, and then eat the whole damn thing (fur, bones and all) before tucking into his travelling bowl of doggy crunch. Most sheep farmers will have first-hand experience of how Fido and Bubbles The Happy Pooches can switch from being “lovable family pets” into slavering hounds capable of maiming and killing many sheep when their idiot owners let them out of the Volvo and into a field.
We had a cairne terrier that had a taste for squirrels and rabbits. Unfortunately he was so darn good at catching them, I was the unlucky one to clean him off after the inevitable bloodbath.
I highly doubt a Bichon Fris (sp?) is going to do that. So I think it is breed specific.
Yes, but they are not wolves, anymore than we are still hunter gatherers. For you to state that a pet dog’s over-riding instinct is to hunt, goes against all the experience I have gathered in my 46 years.
I think you’re being a bit solipsistic there, ivan, if that’s the right term for it. Seems like you’re not going to be persuaded by anyone else’s experience or observation if it doesn’t jibe with your own. But if that’s the case, why bother talking to us?
I’d think many of the responses in this thread point out that he’s hardly alone in his feelings.
Please quote the text where I said that it was an over-riding instinct. I don’t believe that I said any such thing. You claimed that dogs will not hunt and kill unless they are either starving, or have been trained to do so. I disagree.
People have had a lot more than 46 years experience to tell them that untrained, well-fed dogs will hunt and kill other animals. For instance, in the UK alone dogs maim and kill somewhere in the region of 24,000 sheep per year. Are you seriously suggesting that the country is overrun with packs of starving feral dogs and trained sheep-mauling hounds?
Yep. Still, I suspect the ideas espoused by the OP are most likely wrong.
If every dog was an efficient hunter, there would be no need for specialised breeds. And if wolves were just bigger dogs, we would have them as pets!
Which ones in particular, Paul? My main point is that hunting any animal for sport or pleasure, is not the activity of a normal person, and I think the percentage of people who do so, compared to those who don’t, fully bears out what I am saying.
You keep rebutting arguments that nobody here is making.