Hunting is a blood sport. The act of shooting, killing and skinning an animal is repulsive to a lot of people. That does not mean if they eat a hamburger that they are tacitly agreeing that hunting is fine. People have to eat. They do not have to hunt.
Hunters and non hunters are just made up a little differently.
I am told it is bad for the meat as well to not make a clean kill. Something about lactic acid buildup while the injured animal is scared and fleeing? Hunter’s education programs stress a clean kill, and the best way to go about making one. Sure there are probably hunters who fire multiple shots randomly until they hit something, but that doesn’t mean they’re in the majority.
I absolutely disagree. There is a general attempt to make slaughterhouses cheap as possible. Modern factory farms are hell on earth for the animals and often the humans who work in them for very little money and no benefits. There have been a number of videos leaked from slaughterhouses in recent years that show just how horrible they are. Americans like to eat meat without having to think about where it came from, they would much rather eat an animal that spent its life in a pen too small to turn around in as long as they don’t have to know anything about it, or the crap lives of the poor SOB who has to work in the slaughterhouse. Only a society that thinks its meat comes naturally wrapped in plastic on a styrofoam tray could be that delusional.
Great, now I’m hungry for Zoodles.
Eh, I dunno. I remember being just short of my teen years and not being allowed near the area where my dad and uncle were butchering a cow my uncle raised. Something, y’know, about being young and impressionable and a lot of blood was around. 
I wouldn’t feel guilty about eating it, even though I wasn’t there to see it being slaughtered. I know the path from a cow -> my plate and even though I’m not personally involved in it I don’t feel like a hypocrite.
I am a hunter, as I have mentioned in threads before, and I am offended by killing simply for the sport of it. I will not hunt any mammal or bird I do not intend to eat. Clearly I don’t think that to be self-contradictory.
I do think it’s hypocritical to criticize my cousins and I for hunting deer and turkey while eating a cheeseburger.
How? Why is the turkey the Rhymers put on the table this Thanksgiving any more or less deserving of life because it lived in the wild?
I’d actually like to go hunting one day. But I’d only be doing it with an experienced hunter because I don’t know how to skin/prepare an animal I’ve killed.
Until then I’ll just have to hunt my friends in the woods with paintball guns. 
Are you claiming you know how to properly skin and prepare your friends? :dubious:
Seems that would be a trifle difficult. A paintball gun won’t even stun them.
Not safe for…well…anybody…
Butchering the human carcass for human consumption.
http://www.lyndel.com/body_butch.htm
It will if you swing it hard enough.
There’s also the issue that approaching a wounded animal can be risky, as even wounded animals can attempt to fight back. Yeah, deer are cute and “defenseless” until one tries to kick a hunter in the nuts or other soft, vulnerable body part or gore him with antlers.
Someone hunting for food wants a quick, clean kill for a number of reasons.
I eat meat and have no problem with other people hunting, but I will never go hunting myself. I could never bring myself to shoot an animal. I’d just be thinking about my pet cat back home.
It may be hypocritical, but it works for me.
Awesome link. 
No. I’m saying that since I’m not ready to hunt animals I’ll just have to pretend to hunt my friends.
Well, with the link helpfully provided by bdgr, you won’t have to pretend any more. 
Who says that this board doesn’t provide practical advice?
You dress downward to go ratting.
A friend talked about how, when they went to knock down an old farm building known to be swarming with rats, they got a bunch of people together, stood off a ways on one side of it, pushed the building over and had people shooting at all the rats that came out.
So, while I haven’t seen it, I have heard of people getting together socially to kill rats.
I’ll be damned if I know, oh feckless one. I personally believe all animals are deserving of respect in life and a fast and painless death if we find the need to kill it.
And also fitting in with Malacandra’s “kills things that need killing, incidentally deriving satisfaction and enjoyment from it”, I’d offer an example of the great New Zealand Easter Bunny Hunt. 
Animal fur is an interesting side issue too – the anti-fur folks generally don’t seem too interested in the idea that some fur might be OK… say rabbit or possum fur in NZ, where both of those are pests that we’d really like to be rid of. I keep wondering if calling the (hypothetical0 company “Vermin Fur” might help.
No. There is no logical argument for being offended by hunting, provided we’re talking about sustainable hunting of non-threatened species, and that the animal harvested will be utilized.
People that have an issue with hunting aren’t particularly rational.
In fact, I would argue that it is more ethical to hunt and harvest a wild animal than to buy one prepared in the grocery store: Take a steer, raised in a barn and then brought to a feed lot and force fed and given antibiotics because it’s eating food that it has not evolved to eat that is damaging it, living under filthy conditions, knee deep in manure with eye infections and what have you. They time the stay on the feedlot pretty carefully. Any longer and it will likely die. Then of course it dies in blind terror at a slaughterhouse. A chicken’s life is even worse.
Compare that to a deer, or a wild boar or a turkey that lived its life naturally in the wild up until the moment it encountered a predator who killed it. It’s a much better life.
Hunting conserves land and helps manage wild populations responsibly. If you are a responsible hunter, paying for his license your contributing to that effort. When you a steak at the grocery store, no portion of that money goes to conserving game lands or ensuring the sustainability of wild species. When you buy a hunting license, it does.
Plus, it’s a lot of fun. Great outdoors, exercise, it requires a good bit of skill to do it well.
If you’re going to eat meat, I think it’s more responsible to participate in the process and understand the cost first hand, at least occasionally.
According to the omnivore’s dilemma, wild caught game is much healthier than its factory fed counterpart as a food item. He killed wild game and had it analyzed against its domestic counterparts for nutrition. The meat from a wild animal is much better for you.
Then, there’s just this whole weird unhealthy thing in society that I just don’t get: A lot of people seem to work under the principle that suffering, killing and death are wrong or distasteful. The squeamishness makes no sense. Everything dies. All living animals survive at the cost of killing other living things. Every animal that lives, also suffers and experiences pain. It is a part of the natural world that we exist in that they do so. There is nothing inherently good nor bad about it.
We seem to pretend otherwise, though. We hide our old and suffering in hospitals and nursing homes so that we don’t have to deal with it, and we’ve become so afraid of pain or discomfort that we medicate against it at the drop of a hat.
We get so fat and lazy and spoiled and removed from reality that our very definitions of pain keep sliding more and more towards trivialities, like inconvenience. Many consider even basic exercise painful. Our thresholds are so low it’s shameful. That’s what’s artificial. I don’t think the animals are stupid enough to share our vanity on that count.
I think if you hunt and you open yourself up to the experience, you have the opportunity to understand that truth that most of us have insulated ourselves to our detriment. It’s why I did it.
It’s sort of the same reason I run marathons and 50 milers nowadays. If you court suffering, and become familiar with it, it’s just another sensation, and one that is not particularly important or meaningful in and of itself. Do it enough and you understand the most basic axiom of life: Your body is nothing more than a pressurized bag of shit. Truly understand that, and you can make it do whatever you want, because you understand the separation and sameness between your body and “you.” Your body doesn’t control you, you control it. Most people just let their bodies boss them around, and the default setting for your body is to simply eat, drink, conserve energy. If you don’t court discipline through discomfort it’s hard for the “you,” to be strong enough to overcome the minor discomfort in doing stuff other than eating, drinking, and being sedentary, which oddly, makes you suffer more in the long run.
Anyway, I digress. You understand some of that, you get some of its sense from hunting.
Personally, I’d love to try hunting in the truly old school sense, Persistence hunting. That is, run a deer down until it collapses of heat exhaustion.
That’s what we evolved to do, run and hunt. If we don’t exercise our bodies and minds and use them in the way that they were evolved to be used, we risk damaging them and atrophying them. We risk getting sick.
This aversion to hunting, and this aversion to suffering that we as a society have acquired is to me a pretty strong sign that we are physically and mentally sick as a society. We are allowing ourselves to believe things about our selves that just aren’t true.
So, ummmm. That’s why it’s wrong to be against hunting.
Czarcasm
You asked what animals kill for “fun.” That’s a human term, and one that may or may not apply to the emotions of animals. Certainly, lots of animals kill needlessly in a way that we might interpret as “fun.”
Having witnessed it, I’m pretty damn sure that a dog going on a killing spree in a chicken coup is having a grand old time of it, and doing it just for the sheer pleasure of it. For my border collie, catching frisbees seems to run a distant second.
Foxes, cats, monkeys, dolphins most every animal that predates also plays at it. Play, which I guess is “fun,” is how most higher animals acquire and maintain skills. That’s the evolutionary purpose of play.
You attempt to be trying to put some moral distinction between the actions of animals and humans, but we do the same things for mostly the same reasons which differ only slightly depending upon the niche those species evolved into.
I think the idea that humans kill for fun and animals don’t is giving us a distinction that we don’t deserve, a vanity I don’t share with you.
Ironically, the distinguishing feature between animals and humans is that, at least as far as we know, humans are the only predators to worry about killing animals for fun.