I grew up on a farm in central Illinois. My father hunts. He has ALWAYS hunted. As a child, HIS father told him tha he couldn’t have a rifle until he reached the ripe old age of ten. Ten.
When I was six years old, he killed a deer, gutted it, and hung it upside down from a tree in our back yard. My sister and I both had nightmares for weeks. Oddly, my dad never killed another deer, because he felt badly about it for some reason. He does, however, continue to get up at 3:30 in the morning during duck, goose, and pheasant hunting seasons.
My feelings about this are mixed and contradictory. My dad was raised in a sort of “hunting culture.” It’s simply something he DOES. He enjoys it, and gets a kind of pride from eating what he kills (when he can get my squeamish mother to cook it) that one can never get from providing food in another way.
However, a couple of people here have already touched on my admittedly weak objections to this “sport.” Whoever it was that used the word “wussification” hit it right on the head. I object to the sort of “gun culture” that follows hunters. In this space and time, I think there are detrimental affects of considering it “manly” to shoot and kill. Regardless of what ELSE this sport provides, it also constitutes violence. Violence is NOT a necessary right of manhood. It doesn’t make one powerful or macho, and gun ownership does not make one strong.
That’s not to say, as someone mentioned, that all hunters are men. I’m just making a point about the cultural issues involved in hunting tha don’t necessarily have to do with food acquisition and consumption.
The other issue I have problems with is what my dad calls wildlife conservation. When I rib him about his hunting habit, he tells me he has to do it because otherwise, there would be an overpopulation of whatever it is he’s blowing to bits tha day.
In my opinion, there is some very bad logic used in justifying hunting this way. Why is there an overpopulation of pheasants? Well, because my father et al shot all of their natural predators and took up all of their natural habititats for farming and other things, thus pushing larger populations into smaller areas.
Not only that, but natural predators are most likely to get weakened, sick, or otherwise slow or non-viable pheasants to feed on. My dad, however, shoots the ones that are quickest to take off when rooted out. This FURTHER screws up an ecology that he’s tampered with in the first place.
This “wildlife” conservation theory is only a way to justify something they want to do. If it were REAL conservation, the natural predators could be introduced, more land could be set aside for habitats, etc.
Even though it may not seem that way, I really don’t object to my dad’s hunting. He enjoys it, it’s part of who he is, and that’s that. But I have to admit to a little uneasiness at seeing a loved one with a gun in their arms. Or toting a bloodied bird by the legs and grinning. It may not be a particularly logical uneasiness, but I find it’s there anyway.
-L
. He grew up fairly poor ( but not starving ) in the same area ( near Export, PA ) on a “semi-subsistence” farm, with a coal miner father. His descriptions of his childhood almost exactly mirror yours 
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