I can and will invite you - assuming you can get to Pennsylvania safely and legally. Heck - as long as you are in the US, I can probably find you a buddy no matter where you are. But I will add a little caveat - we’ll have to get to know each other better. Like I tell kids in the hunter ed classes I teach, a good hunting buddy is a lot harder to find than game to hunt or good places to hunt it.
Heck - that may just be the solution. Take one of your states hunter education/safety classes. You may just find someone there willing to mentor you a bit.
If you’re serious, make note of my “name” and give me a PM some day.
Quite frankly, I couldn’t give a shit why you or your kin hunt; I’ve got plenty of hunters in my own family who use the same tired arguments and defenses to justify their position (and they always feel the need to justify it). They get just as riled up and belligerent about it, too.
In any conversation where something, anything, someone else enjoys appears to be in any way slighted, there’s always some angry, red-faced, foot-stompers who’ll want to yammer on ad naseum in defense of their favorite sport, movie, music, or political cause and convince you how wrong your opinion is and how right their opinion is.
I don’t understand hunting; I don’t get what makes hunting such a rich and wonderful experience to the people who do. Personally, I think it’s a little weird to derive pleasure from killing something. Sorry you don’t agree, but that’s really more of a ‘you’ problem than a ‘me’ problem. Deal with it.
Then why didn’t you open this thread in the Pit, since it appears to be a rant rather than anything you wanted to have a discussion on? People are trying to answer your question, but you don’t appear interested in listening.
You are, in other words, claiming the ability to apprehend my motives from a distance based on no evidence whatsoever. You are claiming that you know my thoughts, feelings, and impulses without need of discourse. I was not aware that you were from Betazed.
The nearest I have come to getting riled up is when I noted that I was reminding myself not to curse, as this is not the pit. Please show where I have been belligerant. I have not insulted you, either directly or by implication. I have not called your motives into question or implied that I have some gnostic insight into your character which you yourself lack. I have treated you with considerably more courtesy than you have treated hunters, if I may say so.
This last passage convinces me of your disingenousness.
Honestly, I don’t get it either. I have nothing against it; I just don’t see the appeal.
My wife’s side of the family is southeastern Missouri redneck, to the bone, and the men in her family live and die by huntin’ season. Whatever works for you, fellas. I’ll sit in the family room and watch a football game, thanks.
I will say this in favor of hunting: Some states utilize hunting as a means of managing the deer population. For this I am thankful, because I’ve seen my share of cars wrapped around deers, and I know that this practice reduces the odds of my number coming up.
Don’t bother. He’s just trying to ruffle feathers, and has already admitted that he doesn’t care about the opinions of people who have some experience.
Near as I can tell, the appeal of hunting is rather similar to the things you love about fishing–luring the animal in, making it think it’s not in danger, the physical challenge of actually getting the shot off successfully. All of that is a necessary component to hunting. Deer are wild animals with self-preservation instincts to at least the same extent fish are, and unlike fish they can actually see and smell us out there. That’s why they sell all those doe-urine type scent maskers and camo and whatnot.
After all, when you think about it, fishing is at least as perverse as hunting. You offer a dumb animal with no defenses something attractive to it, attempting to convince it that you’re harmless. If the animal falls for the ruse, you’re going to attempt to jam a pointy chunk of metal through some portion of its anatomy, usually the mouth but sometimes the gill or eye. If that attempt is successful, you will then attempt to drag it from its habitat with it struggling desperately all the way. If you are successful, you’ll haul the poor creature into an environment where it physically cannot oxygenate its blood and will soon suffocate. At that point, you will either kill it and feast upon its carcass, or throw it back, having put it through all that for nothing but your own pleasure.
When you think about it in the terms you’re defining hunting, fishing sounds pretty damn twisted.
No, no, no. Fishing is about drinking beer. As Grandpa Rhymer used to say, “You have to be careful to use the right bait, because if you mess up and use something the fish will actually nibble at, you might spill your Bud.”
As a kid my family fished much. Not much beats very fresh seafood IMO. But let me tell you, those were some DAMN expensive fish we were eating. And thats not even considering our time invested.
I suspect with most hunters its the same. Its lots of things, but for most of them I bet thats also some damn expensive meat.
I don’t hunt but I do taget shoot, paper targets tremble in my prescence!
Here is what I don’t “get” about Hunting:
Hiding in a tree, wearing Deer scent, all Camo’ed up waiting for Bambi to come for the food (or the salt) that has been there everyday is NOT Hunting in my book. Hunting would involve… ACTUALLY Hunting.
If hiding in a tree stand and killing stuff is your idea of a sport, that’s fine. Do the world a favor and “Hunt” crack dealers.
Regarding the skill of tracking and stalking…how much of it is just confirmation bias on the part of the hunter, or conflating scarcity with elusiveness? I.e., I bagged a deer, therefore I have great skill.
I’m not a hunter, but I have countless times camping or hiking when I’ve stumbled across wildlife while we’ve all been laughing and taking up a noisy storm. Hell, I’ve zipped open my tent and been nose-to-nose with elk and wolves. Just this weekend, I had to stop in my car for a group of a dozen elk crossing a state highway. Game animals just don’t seem to try very hard at keeping out of rifle range.
At least on my parent’s acreage, the deer and turkey seem to have a pretty clear idea of when hunting season is (or maybe hunting season was planned to be during the time they move deeper into the woods or something)–during spring and summer there will commonly be groups of animals wandering along the edges of meadows and across the driveway, but during fall/winter they retreat to the deeper woods and change their movement patterns almost completely.