And condemning it based on the actions of a small minority is fucking stupid.
Yeah, but unless your “l” is somewhere in Nowheresville, Japan, I’m afraid our love will have to go unrequited.
I was talking about Full House to a friend not 3 weeks ago after not having thought about it since I watched it as a kid. He knew that Kimmy’s last name was Gibbler. I had no such recollection of this. What strange coincidences the internets hath wrought unto us in this day and age. And it seems like only yesterday that I was seriously answering the a/s/l question on AOL.
It was only yesterday that I answered “asl?” That’s how my friend and I text each other to ask “Where you at?” Hence my delight.
Is it really a small minority?
If you don’t know, then why bring it up?
I feel obliged to point out that I don’t do the butchering myself, partly because I’m so freaking lazy and partly because my cousin is so good at it.
Until recently I always went hunting with the same group: the two of my male cousins I like best, and one of my brothers. (Recently my stepdaughter joined the mix, a change I stupidly resisted for a long time.) We do it in memory of our grandfather, who taught us to hunt; we started making it a tradition when our parents started dying. (We’re reaching that generational shift.) We don’t kill anything we’re not prepared to butcher and eat, and we don’t kill more than we have room for. Assuming my stepdaughter is still living with me this autumn, that means that I won’t take down a deer if she does. And we don’t aim at anything we do not feel extremely confident of taking down. Because we’re not assholes.
Well, the kid isn’t. My brother, cousins & I are frequently assholes. Just not about this.
It’s not that it’s difficult to understand, but rather that it’s an enormously hypocritical position to take. Having your dinner industrially raised in cramped squalor ending with a bolt to the brain that you never actually had to see is fine, but god forbid someone shoots a deer that has lived its life in the wild.
I hate to tell ya, but your McChicken didn’t lead a happy life before you ordered it at the drive-thru.
In 2007, there were 19 deaths in all of US and Canada due to hunting-related incidents. That is a steady decline from 91 in 2000. Those numbers are miniscule.
Now, I know you weren’t just talking about deaths, so here is a report from South Dakota of all incidents reported in that state for the year 2008. 30, total. It doesn’t include people accidentally shooting inanimate objects, though.
“Small minority” is an understatement.
If you want to talk about how many animals are left to “wander off and die”, you’ll have to more accurately define what you mean. A deer who makes it a small distance before dying? Animals that are never recovered? What?
We have to consume other living things to survive. If carrots screamed in agony as we ripped them out of mother earth ,we might be reluctant to eat them too. if fish had vocal cords we might be wary of eating them . We know that we have to kill to flourish. But we do not have to enjoy it. That seems a little less civilized.
Hunting is regulated by the states, so finding national statistics is very difficult. However, according to Wikipedia (which cites the U.S. Dept. of the Interior)
The Michigan DNR posts information on the number of hunting licenses sold, deaths and injuries from 1940 to 2005. You can see that while the number of hunting licenses has increased, there are far fewer injuries and deaths today than in 1940. The average number of hunting licenses sold per year between 2001-2005 was 2,498,980.2. In that same time period, there were an average of 2.2 deaths and 32 injuries per year. So the percentage of hunting licenses that result in an injury or fatality is 0.001369%. I’d say that’s not bad.
Compare that to working in a slaughterhouse
I wasn’t going to get into the hunting thing at all, been there done that got the headaches to show for it. I was just going to make my chicken mcnugget comment and move on but I was just so annoyed that someone thinks eating meat and opposing hunting are contradictory that I just had to make a comment even though I knew it would not go over well. I could have phrased my comment to be less likely to provoke a reaction but I had a knee jerk response, like many people here do. It’s the internet, it’s what we do here.
I usually avoid hunting discussions because they always run like this, someone opposes it with an extreme PETA-like view and everyone piles on because let’s face it, we all hate PETA, so if someone sounds like a PETA person they must be completely wrong and bonkers. Anyone else who posts after that opposing hunting will be included in the crazy PETA group by everyone else. Talk about a broad brush. Then we get the hunters that say they do everything right and kill their prey with kindness and use all the carcass and those assholes that shoot anything that moves, take a trophy and leave the rest to rot and leave the woodlands littered with their beer cans are a very small few who travel the world making a bad name for the good hunters. But really, there are more than just a few bad hunters, just as their are more than just a few PETA whackjobs and there are even many more people with opinions somewhere in the middle. But let’s face it, no side it ever going to convince the other side they are wrong and no middle ground is allowed.
I used to fish a lot. I ate what I caught and I tried to humanely release any fish that I did not want, including a lovely snook that was just a day out of season. If I snagged a line I worked hard to release it instead of just cutting it and leaving hundreds of feet of line laying around to snag some poor seabird or passerby. I always cleaned up after myself and never left garbage laying around. I even cleaned up after the jerks who left crap laying around. There are a lot of responsible fishermen who do these things, there are also just as many asshole fishermen who don’t. I don’t really fish anymore because I don’t have the time or someone to fish with and I got put off by all the assholes.
But I don’t oppose fishing and I do oppose hunting, why? Probably because I think bad hunters are much more dangerous to everyone around them and the environment than bad fishermen (not including commercial fishing in this, that’s a whole 'nother kettle of something). I also don’t buy how hunters are doing some great environmental service. Those who hunt do so because they love to hunt, very few do it because they need to hunt to survive or because Mother Nature desperately needs their help to thin herds. Seriously, Mom Nature can usually handle it as long as people don’t interfere. I don’t think hunting makes you a murderer but I don’t think it’s as noble and necessary as many hunters claim.
However, I don’t want to take all your hunting away from you or the fishing away from the sport fishermen. I personally just don’t like hunting. I wish that there were more requirements for people to get fishing and hunting licenses than currently exist and a better way to eliminate all the assholes from either activity. Yes, I know I am dreaming. I know that won’t ever happen because sport fishing and hunting is an important tourist draw in some areas and they want it to be easy for visitors. I know it’s also dreaming to think you can post an opposing opinion in the Pit and not get jumped on.
I probably won’t be back to this thread for two reasons; I am now going to stick to my initial intent of not getting involved in this debate which will go nowhere and mostly because I have plans for the next few days so if I do log on it won’t be long enough to catch up here.
If you still wish to jump my shit, have at it, but I think mutantmoose is still lurking about and might be more willing to give you some sport.
I don’t like hunting either, fwiw. But I realize that without apex predators in the US it’s necessary to keep the deer and wild pig populations in check…in fact, even with all the hunting being done we aren’t keeping up well. I remember out here in the west when they had to send park rangers in helicopters to shoot wild horses from the air because their populations were out stripping their resources due to the fact that there aren’t enough high order predators to thin the herds.
While I personally don’t enjoy hunting and would rather have a root canal than go on a hunt with something other than a paint ball gun, there is a real need for hunting and hunters of certain types of game animals. People who hunt for meat (and who actually eat the meat) are valuable and shouldn’t be denigrated against by anyone…especially vegan types. As I said up thread, the hunter is actually filling a valuable niche while the vegan isn’t. Looked at morally, the hunter is the more moral of the two IMHO, because s/he is filling that niche that would otherwise not be filled, and thus culling the herds that would otherwise outstrip their resources and then be subject to disease and starvation…as well as impacting our own food growing systems by becoming pests, or dangers on the road as they roam further looking for resources.
That said, I’m more in favor of some kinds of hunting over others.
-XT
So how are things in Nirvana these days?
We all have to die sometime, and animals don’t die full of years, surrounded by friends and family, covered in blankets and being whispered gentle truths and lies about their past and future life. Human animals are most often not so lucky either. Hunters have the courage to stare death in the face, to look another living thing in the face and say ‘yes, I killed this.’ They accept that life is pain, that death is part of life, and that we all have blood on our hands. Better it be deer blood I say, than the slow bleed leaking internally from the wounds we give to each other daily.
Good idea; I’ll check. Maybe at the municipal farmer’s market. I was thinking of looking for grass-fed beef; feeding cattle on grain is a really inefficient way of feeding people.
“Poaching.”
I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t stick around if I couldn’t at least come close to backing up the things I say.
That really highlights how idiotic mutantmoose’s position is. If all hunters cared about was killing, why spend hundreds of dollars and waste a weekend tramping around in the woods, just to maybe kill one animal, when they could get a job in a slaughterhouse and get paid to commit sweet, sweet murder all day?
Why is the killing of a wild animal any less justifiable than the killing of livestock?
I don’t hunt for trophies. I wouldn’t hunt any animal I don’t intend to eat (with the exception of turkeys). Why is the hunting of a prey animal such as deer, whose population has grown past the numbers where its einvironment can sustain it because of human action, any morally different than your buying a steak?
I take this to mean you hunt, but don’t eat, wild turkeys. Why not eat them? Sounds yummy.