I Have Nothing Against Hunting…
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Totally agree !
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Positively perfect. Couldn’t agree more.
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totally also agree
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… I don’t like hunting for the sake of having an exotic animal on your mantle either, there’s no point in it, but hunting non-predator animals that live in massive numbers isn’t wrong. The lives of the Native Americans on the Great Plains of North America included hunting buffalo for food and clothing. Buffalo are scarce now, but that’s not because of the Native Americans, it’s because settlers decided “Hey! Let’s completely exploit and deplete this natural resource for no good reason!” That’s different than Uncle Richard going out on Thursday evening with the nephews to shoot a wild turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
There are people who are thankful for nature, and people who just exploit it recklessly. Please know who and what you’re really aiming at before you go pull a trigger.
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Also, since the Native Americans believed in living with the land, which included eating some animals, why don’t I see these people getting in THEIR faces? Hm? Maybe because the “naive unintelligent redman” were on to something? Shucks, they even lived peace with wolves for the most part. Yep. Methinks thou dost protest too much.
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Don’t be so quick to think the Native Americans are all good when it comes to hunting; there are members among them who are just as vile as European hunters. They trap and skin animals to sell the pelts just the same as anyone else does. Killing something for ‘tradition’ is also a means of sport hunting, when it comes to lives I very much doubt the one being killed cares if the one killing them respects them or not. If you don’t need to kill something – don’t kill it. And just because something has been done in the past doesn’t mean it should continue. Think a little more.
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Very well said John!!
For the wolves, For the wild ones,
Nabeki
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Eh no, no I didn’t say they all were like that. In fact I think you’re on a very different page, pal.
I could climb into the truck right now and drive up to my aunt’s cattle ranch and help her kill a cow and take it to the butcher. That’s different than getting out the shotgun and killing a horse. If I COULD do both, I wouldn’t kill the horse, but I would help my aunt. You just go ask yourself why. Why a cow but not a horse. Why a pheasant but not a mockingbird. Why a bigmouth bass but not a whale. Why a wild boar but not a wolf. Lemme give you a hint: same reason for all four. Don’t understand why? Maybe that’s because someone has been generalizing people.
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Ben, going out into the woods for a turkey for thanksgiving is just the same as flying to Africa to kill animals there. The point is, if you don’t have a live-or-die reason to hunt then you don’t need to do it. If you don’t need to kill then don’t. Simple.
To kill an animal just because you happen to be able to is not a sign of respect for the animal or nature, it is just another method of exploitation. The hunting of non-predatory animals is also linked to mass slaughter of predators to create an overabundance of prey for human consumption.
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You’re really making me laugh. You really don’t get it. My entire family agrees what the government is doing to nature is wrong. We’re a family of INDEPENDENT farmers. When my aunt’s dairy was going broke, they didn’t take any money from the government. They still have a few cows but half their buildings are empty or abandoned. My other aunt is doing better, but my uncle is working for the power plant now.
You and me are on the same side on one thing: the government should stop trying to play god with the ecosystem and build a real fence to keep so-called “vermin” out of their livestock. But if you’re trying to make me turn and point a gun at the head of a loved family member instead of a pheasant, you’re not going to make any headway. Let me ask you a sincere question: are you this fired up when it comes to abortion? Not a single cell, but a fertilized, multicellular, rapidly growing fetus? Growing a heart, fingerprints, and a human brain – the most complex and capable brain on earth? If you value the life of an unfertilized chicken egg, a single celled organism mind you, how much more do you value a human fetus?
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Ben…the point of the poster is to debunk the argument that “killing humanely”, whatever the heck that means, is a ridiculous. There is no way to kill humanely. Do you think deer or elk suffer less than other animals when shot with a high powered rifle?
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No they don’t suffer less. My argument here is that some animals should be hunted, others shouldn’t. And if you don’t share the same view, then that’s you, you have the right to believe that and I’ll respect it.
I restate the last 14 lines of my previous response.
Money could be spent by activist groups on wildlife refuges, but instead it’s spent on shirt boards that people with “flavorful” vocabularies wear in public when they want to come up to random strangers and piss them off. That’s what I don’t get.
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That was called market hunting, back in the 1800s. From passenger pigeons to antelope, to the millions of waterfowl that used to travel between the Arctic and the wetlands of North America, all were swept away for sale to the growing cities. This was in the years before cattle were brought to the Great Plains.
Bison were hunted since the 1700s, mostly by Plains tribes for trade to the Mississippi River traders, who were French, Spanish, and British & Yankee. (In this case only the terrible repeated smallpox and other killing epidemics saved the bison of the southern half of the Plains. The Northern half survived well with the peoples there being farther from the heavy trading centers, the difference in the Northern tribal philosophies, the shorter seasons and increased migration and interspersing mountain valleys and watercourses.
It was market hunting which crushed the diversity of life from the land, just as “bush meat” now is doing in African areas.
Wealthy nobility and others from Europe organised large hunting expeditions for griz and big elk, moose, and bison. These are chronicled, and show the large numbers of large game lost for trophies and “sport.” (“sport” hunting was originally a white man’s term for all non-market hunting, including subsistence)
Nowadays, of course, elk hunters do it for a year’s meat in the freezer, EXCEPT for those who come from other states, etc. who do it for trophies, supporting the problematic outfitters who make so much money and affect state and national politics through wanting to create a quick shot, and get to the next paying customer.
The self-righteousness of hunters and lobbies often stems from their inaccurate perception that those who wish to control the killing spree are urban, while they are true rural mountain men, etc. Even government agencies see through this falsehood, and divide wildlands usage into exploitative and non-exploitative use.
Because I was born in the North, and still know many indigenous people, I recognize that the farther North one goes, the more meat-dependent humans are. They use the skins and furs, the sinews, the organs, and once, even the bones. But the important difference is between subsistence and the warped killing for pleasure. These are cultures so far apart as to be diametrically opposite. In a world where you even wear the animals you have taken, the recognition that their kind have their own lives and value to themselves equal to your own, and your own kind, you both accept their death and your own people’s death and transfiguration into one another – and more, into all other things, and the air itself.
Almost all white hunters are, on the other hand, “sport” hunters and have no physical, cultural, or biological understanding of the flow among all things, and instead seek to pretend that they are not a part – even to the extent of burying themselves in boxes or burning to avoid proper recycling through the vultures and others who do their job of returning all things to be meat for others, plant and animal. To them, the world only exists for the use and pleasure of humans. This is the fiction which you now see everywhere cancerously ailing the earth, and beginning to infect the human species as it has reached improbably excessive numbers, and scrabbles for whatever is not yet taken.
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I agree. I’m not going to get all up in the faces of family members who have Deer racks on their wall though, Whitetail Deer are different than North American Wolves or African Lions. I would eat (and I have eaten) deer and elk meat, but I wouldn’t eat lion or wolf meat. And there’s a logical, scientific reason why. And it’s not preference or morals, although those are also valid reasons.
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Amen!
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This is a great message to bad those noble rich that are going over to Africa just won’t get it.
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For all the discussion about whether it is wrong to kill one animal over another, where is the understanding that the world certainly isnt the same as it was when settlers first came to North America where indigenous peoples already had a hunting culture. The difference is
1) extreme loss of habitat for wildlife 2) extreme growth of human population in proportion to that of wildlife. If a given percentage of humans are going to get out there and slaughter predators, then we are going to see a grave decline of wildlife, predators and non-predators. People in this country who make a practice of killing all wildlife they come into contact with do not understand the intrinsic value of predators. The ecology has changed, the proportions of open land, populations of wildlife and humans are vastly changed. Wildlife is also under assault from environmental contamination, pollution of streams.
I agree that subsistence hunting is fundamentally different from killing for sport. Yet it is not simply the White killer who is at fault, it is a killing culture that fosters and perpetuates the myth of justifiable slaughter of wildlife. In my state there is a group of men (yes, they are all White) who have a club. The purpose of the club is to kill ravens and crows. They display pictures of the hundreds if not thousands of birds they have killed for no reason other than in these men’s minds it is good fun. The same mentality slaughters coyotes, wolves, foxes, wild cats and bears. This isnt hunting.
Add in the percentage of people who actually hunt for food to the masses who slaughter for fun and you have a horribly imbalanced equation. It is no longer a discussion about who can justifiably kill who, it is about are we going to have any wildlife left on earth in the coming generations.
People who go to Africa to use high powered rifles to slaughter endangered wildlife are not hunters, they are opportunists with no conscience and a skewed sense of self. Their motives are mostly about trying to impress others and self-aggrandizement. What skill is there to pose on a carcass after using trained guides and laser powered rifles to take down your prey? None, zero. It is an activity based on novelty and on flaunting disrespect and contempt, based on what they perceive or would like others to believe is their power, wealth and privilege.
If you are of the opinion that animals are there to be ‘taken’, in other words, they are there for you to kill at your leisure, then you need to seek an honest response – what is my true motivation? Because that will tell you whether you are a hunter or simply a killer.
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