Will you PLEASE stop it with the insanse over-exaggeration of everything posted in this thread? It really is very important for you to grasp that things which happen naturally on a fairly frequent basis do not necessarily happen all the time without exception. For instance, it can rain, and yet it does not rain all the time. People need to shit, and yet they do not spend their entire lives sitting on a toilet, and so on. Many dogs are perfectly willing and able to kill rabbits unprompted given the opportunity, and yet 100% of dogs do not spend 100% of their time trying to kill rabbits. Get it? Your fat old labradoodle may never have displayed any hunting behaviour in it’s entire life - yet it may respond to it’s first sight of your niece’s pet guinea pig running round the room by instantly killing it.
Dogs do not spend their entire lives looking for things to kill, any more than they spend their entire lives looking for toddlers to knock over and terrorise in over-boisterous play - yet both are things which most dogs are capable of doing, and which it is your responsibility as an owner to keep from happening. And lets put it this way - the (densely built-up, suburban) area where I live is swarming with foxes and squirrels which have essentially no fear of humans and show little concern about you approaching within ten feet or so. When there are dogs running about on the common, you never see any foxes, or any squirrel that is not up a tree - and with good reason.
tomndebb: I apologised for the inappropriateness of the sentence you refer to, in a previous post. Should I do it again cos you weren’t here? If I put a cheesy grin after my next blanket statement, will it be allowed to slip? No one else seemed to get offended, so what are you getting so uppity about?
Slaphead: You seem to be the one going wildly off kilter. You keep making these obvious generalisations about dogs, that I am fully aware of , but none of them discredit my initial, also generalised claim, that the domestic dog’s predatory instincts are not what they used to be.
Don’t you see this thread is not about dogs anyway? Talk about something more germane to topic, and get off this high-horse you seem to be prancing about on.
Your apology seemed about as sincere as all the rest of your posts in this thread (along with many other posts in several other threads) and I wanted to be sure that you recognized that your behavior continues to be out of line without you believing that a hasty “Sorry (sorta)” was going to be an acceptable response to bad behavior.
By definition, I cannot get “uppity” in a Forum that I Moderate. Since you are already attracting a fair amount of attention regarding your behavior, you might reconsider responding to official staff remarks with insults.
So then, asking for clarification of what I am doing wrong, in order to avoid doing it again in future, is being insincere and attention-seeking? I am not raising this issue merely to be obstreperous, but because I am genuinely confused! Can you elaborate on my errors, or should I wait for tomndebb to come along?
I personally object to the sheer repetition. You feel big game hunters are bad… I get it. You’ve got about 40 posts to this thread and a casual survey shows they’re all versions of this premise.
Cheney showed what hunters can turn into. Go to a place where they keep animals for that purpose. Drive out in a jeep and shoot away. I still picture the old dude holding a bird by its feet when Cheney shot it. This is the kind of hunting you can not defend. It is bloodlust.
Hunting is not my thing, but I have a friend that bow hunts. I can see the challenge in that. You have to track them through the wilds and get a close enough and unobstructed shot. I see a skill level. i still would not do it.
I can derive pleasure from hunting, but not the morbid kind. I’m not avidly proud that I have killed something and it’s certainly not a power thrill, for me. Some people get the power thrill, and those people disgust me. I (feel like) have nothing in common with the people who drive up to a hunting spot, park their cars outside the woods and leave the storm-lights on to attract or frighten prey into their zones. Those people are just out there for the kill, not the hunt.
For me it’s an emotional and physical feeling of accomplishment. I’ve been to all kinds of hunts - the ones where you stroll out early in the night, settle down at a scouted spot (with all the skill and experience that requires) and wait for the prey I’ve been quotaed. Or the ones where six or seven of us pack our rucksacks and disappear into the mountains for a week or tenday, hunting small game and bird. Having spent four days walking in rough terrain, with a 20kg backpack and a shotgun, you feel like it’s a culminating experience to manage to sneak up on a bird (we call them “rype”, I’m not sure of the English term) hiding from you, scare it up into the air at perhaps only three or four metres, then shoot it. It requires a whole lot of practice, skill and discipline.
For the record, I bring my camera to all my hunting trips and have brought home more trophies of the photographic kind than the meat kind, on an order of magnitude.
I’m not good with words, but I think the prevalence of hunting even in our “civilized” society is still with us because it takes far more time, effort, skill, training, preparation and discipline than a number of other hobbies. It’s not instant gratification, it’s not easy and you’ll fail far more times than you will succeed. The payoff is there, of course, but it’s more because of the investment that you feel good about it.
And you’re out there with some of your best friends, spending time doing something physical and out in nature. The only thing that seperates it from a hike is the constant alertness, tension and excitement. I imagine serious mountain hikers or off-peak snowboarders who spend months preparing get a similiar payoff when they’re done.
Word.
Although I may be one of the few people in the world that would like to go have a drink with the guy, I don’t want to go hunting with him. And I wouldn’t leave my wallet on the bar. Or turn my back. But that’s off the topic a bit.
I don’t think someone who is already opposed to hunting can understand what it’s like when you drop a big animal. I don’t know the words to describe it, nor if the feeling has a name. It’s certainly not anything like pleasure in killing. A long, complicated series of events must come together with a little luck and more than a little skill before a clean kill can be accomplished. Anything but a quick and clean kill results in emotions that I do know the names of - self disgust being but one. We aren’t in the woods to cause pain to those animals, and my hunting partners and myself have abandoned our own hunts to provide a mercy kill to wounded game. I tracked a maimed bull elk for miles, the result of some coward that couldn’t count or aim, to end his suffering. Then, although it wasn’t a legal animal (young bull with only 2 points rather than the required 4) we dressed him and hauled the meat out to the nearest game warden. They gave the meat to the local shelters, I and my buddies were out a day of hunting, I lost my license for that year, but it was a small price to pay.
There is a Forum for challenging Mod actions, (ATMB), and a Forum for whining about those actions (The BBQ Pit). Great Debates is not the place to do either.
Having had a little time to think about things, I can accept my OP was not stated very well.
If I was to do it again, it would have gone like this;
Is there some kind of mental defect in people who kill animals, mainly for vain display purposes?( And I don’t include clothing here, because that has a practical application, although furs do seem a bit sick. Who’d want an Arctic Fox’s head hanging over their shoulder? ) I have never been hunting, and would like a bit of insight into the mind-set of a society that might tolerate such behaviour.
Now I know people have said that this is hardly ever the only reason hunters kill an animal, but there are some hunters that do, and I am wondering if these particular people are noted and monitored, among the hunting fraternity? If so, could any of the hunters on here tell me how many of these type of people they have encountered, and what they thought or did about such people? Do hunters EVER look at their fellow hunters and think, “Whoa!! WTF?”
