According to you we should make recreational fishing illigal, where are you gonna stop? Illigal skeet shooting because it teaches ppl to kill birds?!?!
Personally, I ain’t so big on the hunting for sport thing. But hunting for food, or at least utilising most of the animal you’ve killed for whatever reason (hopefully not for display) that is something I’m more open-minded about.
I figure it’d be morally wrong only if enough people expressed so much distaste for it that society was influenced by that disapproval.
I guess I’m not contributing much here…
Since I don’t eat game I don’t hunt, nor do I fish because I don’t eat fish (and the idea people I know have “catch them, then throw them back if you don’t eat them” seems insane. Why torture the fish at all if I’m not eating them?) but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hunting ** if you plan to eat what you killed.** I eat meat, so why should I quibble with you over whether you got the meat you eat in the store or the woods?
However, if you aren’t eating it,(and preferably making clothing out of it) I have a big problem with that. While I believe that eating something so you can live is a fact of life (unless you’re a herbavoire), killing things simply for fun is wrong, period. Which is one of the reasons I’m less than fond of cats, incidentally.
Jharding:
I wasn’t responding specifically to your post(s) nor offering any critique; If you’re “not quite sure how to respond to the wussification of the american male thing” that’s your problem, not mine. A couple of other points raised:
“Are all hunters men?”
Of course not, thankfully.
“Are men who question the morality of hunting lesser men than those who don’t?”
Usually and generally, yes.
I believe it was SexyWriter who opined “Hunting constitutes Violence.”
While I realize a largely suburban life will somewhat cloud ones perspective, this takes the cake. Humans must kill and eat their food in order to survive – (Sometimes, we have to kill other humans too, but I don’t want our dear readers going apoplectic, so I’ll leave that for another thread) whether it is plant or animal origin. In that sense, all human life is “Violent”; my suggestion for those wracked with guilt for merely being alive is to step aside figuratively, and allow folks with lesser frontal lobe activity to enjoy life unmolested. If you don’t like hunting, then don’t hunt.
I do understand mnementh’s SO’s POV–it’s pretty common in some places where I’ve lived. For some people, there is a mental association: “hunting = drunk, violent, trigger-happy killer who takes the antlers and leaves the carcass and kills as many things as possible regardless of the legal limits.” Obviously, this is not true for many, or even most, hunters, but you may want to ask your SO whether she is thinking like this.
There are aspects of hunting culture I don’t like, but by and large, I think it’s a perfectly OK thing to do. I don’t really think it’s good for us to buy all our meat at the supermarket, nice and neat, and if we had to kill and dress out own meat, we might have more respect for the animals, as well as eating less meat overall. The animals would probably have better lives, too.
Some of your SO’s arguments are pretty silly and can easily be turned around. So you should buy meat at the store because it would be bought anyway? Does she think the same about veal, or does she object to buying it? How’bout fur–it’s in the store, why not buy that? Items made in Chinese sweatshops?
My wife is of the anti-hunting variety, and I don’t argue with her because I’m never going to hunt anyway. But I have friends who do, and I have no objection to them doing so and have never raised any with them because of the environmental issue more than anything else: hunters, for their own self-interested reasons, make excellent allies in the fight for conservation of wild areas. The licenses that hunters buy are used to finance conservation of open areas. Obviously taking a deer that lived wild in a forest is far less environmentally degrading than eating the meat of a cow raised on a pasture that was at one time more than likely a forest or at least a wild meadow that supported far more life and a far greater variety of life than a cow pasture does. People who eat at Mcdonald’s are responsible for far more deforestation and environmental damage (this includes me) than people who take the trouble to go out and hunt what they eat.
How an urban/suburban dweller can object to the hunting habits of his neighbor or of a rural person is beyond my comprehension.
Not an argument I’ll ever make to my wife, though. I don’t enjoy sleeping on the couch.
And now, for a “logical” extension of this sophistry I understand PETA has enlisted the aid of an emasculated Boy Scout condemning, get this-- Fishing.
God Help us all…
:sigh: after reading this thread, I feel there may yet be hope for this country of ours.
Oh, and it’s been a while since I’ve been hunting, but IIRC, the head of a deer is not used as a food item. I see no inherent contradiction to having it preserved and mounted, and looking at it in fond rememberance while eating a nice, juicy venison steak, in a red wine sauce, with mushrooms, homemade garlic mashed potatoes, snap green beans and a nice brown ale to wash it down.
MMMMMM-Good!
I am in general anti hunting. Because most of it that I see is liquid hunting. Bunch of boys pack up the truck with as much beer as it can hold, sit around in the woods holding their high powered rifles throwing empty beer cans at a tree. They buy a couple of pounds of burger on the way home. Yea hunting.
However, the hunters that do so with some amount of resopnsibility to nature, themselves, etc. I have no problem with. Use tools you made yourself and I am in awe. (I have a friend who hunts deer with an atlaydl (sp?), a large dart throwing stick. Permanent awe. He also makes and uses his own longbows. I have no problem with him hunting. If he can kill stuff with what he has made from what he grows in his yard, its enough of a demonstration of skill that I have to respect it.)
So for me, it comes down to “fairness” in the method. If you can make the weapon you are using and it works, have a blast. If you bought something you can understand, eat what you kill, and don’t screw up the woods while you’re at it, eh the deer population isn’t suffering. If you drunkenly hit a deer with your laser cannon, that’s not skillful or manly, take your drunken delusions home and try to pick up your beer cans when you leave.
Its all in the attitude.