Whenever my husband had gone out to hunt in Missouri, I was on my knees praying like mad...we canceled each other out!

The right question is probably, "what were you praying for?"  

LOL, I first took it to mean you prayed for his bad aim which semi-obviously contradicts sentiments you may have felt about hunting.  Maybe you simply hoped that his bad aim wasn't self-destructive?

To other folks, FWIW, avahome's hubby may be a sharpshooting marksman, I don't know.  I'm just trying to puzzle through the motivations for avahome's bouts of acute piety ;-)

by luaptifer on Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 10:04:21 AM EST

I grew up in an area where hunting was almost a necessity for some families to survive -- including my own.  While I don't like it, this is a way that many rural families "keep the wolf from the door".

What I despise are the folks that hunt for the pure pleasure of the kill.  I have seen entire deer left in a gully with only the "rack" taken -- or just the "backstrap" -- those juicy tenderloins that run along the back.  This makes me physically ill.

I just don't understand how human beings -- who are supposed to be so evolved -- can enjoy killing something just for the "sport" of it.


by roxy317 on Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 12:45:05 PM EST

How does catching mice compare to hunting? You can do it with traps and technology, like the sticky stuff they step on and that's it, but they're still alive. You can hire a feline assistant to police the inner recesses of your property and keep an eye and ear on places you can't get to easily. What cats do to mice is also really disgusting. I preferred that symbol of the wisdom of the ages, the black snake. They'll take care of mice. You don't even know, they don't need light, they just go to work. And then you'll see them out in the sun snoozing happily, looking like they swallowed a foot ball. Some people think that's disgusting too. Mice breed faster than black snakes eat them though, so that's a problem.

Its the same with Bambino and Bambina. They were cute chasing around the apple tree in the back of the yard. When hunting season comes along in November the first casualty is always human, shot by mistake, by another human. The first deer with so many points doesn't make the front page. Hunting season is breeding season. The amount of damage they all do to the cars on the over-crowded local highways as they move around trying to do what they need to do is probably some off-set to the body count. But that seems like such a real wierd way to look at it too.

There are health issues, like the mouse hunt. There are public safety issues, like traffic pile-ups. There are aesthetic issues like working with black snakes to deal with rodents isn't for everyone. Nor is picking live mice off sticky paper.

I still don't understand where man got the idea that he's the one who decides who lives and who dies, and how. I don't think God, just to use that name, did put everything here especially for us and our use. Better to respect what we discover here and learn to live with it because we can't be sure what any of us are doing here or why.

So I don't think we should hunt. You do need to take care of the mice, squirrels, raccoons, possums and other creatures which treat our garbage in exactly the same way we seem to be treating the rest of creation. "Don't know who put it here, but it must be just for us otherwise they wouldn't have left it so handy would they?" Whatever it is for, the one thing we do all know about it is that whoever, or whatever made it, no one and nothing gets a second chance. So why fool with that?

by Chris White on Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 04:26:07 PM EST

I'm not an advocate of wanton killing by believing that some hunting is necessary in the environment we've created and in which we all live day to day.  

In fact, I am pacific, if not able to call myself a pacifist any longer  but I  am lodged into the grey space of both spectra by similar reasoning.  

I find myself expressing the problem I run into as what an idealist must do to live in the real world.

  Though I wish and still ideally hope that human nature would deliver us into the Utopian dream of tomorrow, I've come to accept that, by the sunset of this day, we ain't gonna be there yet.  

Our world can support some godly Gandhis but it's been my observation that Mahatma's way outnumbered by Pol Pots and Idi Amins.  

It really sucked when I was forced to that conclusion but trained as a scientist I've gotta go with the evidence and not the faith.  We've just not evolved the selfish gene out of human kind yet.

I am a sympathizer and supporter of many objectives of animal rights groups.  Heck, I'm a biologist by training and one who opted for the study of microbes and plants because I am an animal-lover who was not realy happy with  some of the  in vivo work I had to do.  

I own a firearm.  The path which led me to make that purchase wended its way through hundreds of miles of hiking in woods where I saw 30 bears in the space of three years after decades of only seeing them in zoos.  It was clear, however, that the twenty-pound walking stick I hiked with probably wouldn't have fended off mama bear the day she packed her cubs up a tree and then disappeared to I didn't know where.  Had she come back for me, I imagined what that stick might do but bears are damn fast in real life.

I loved that encounter but I knew that if forced to make the choice, I was not gonna be a pacifist.  The day I bought that weapon was a day my hair stood on end.

And it was a year later that the house shook when a five or six hundred pounder jumped onto my back porch.  I thought a tree had fallen on the roof.  It was that night an extremely hungry 7-foot tall bear returned to my porch four different times and I was able to execute the plan I'd formulated before buying the gun.  

I fired four rounds that night and though within two to ten feet of him, each shot was well over the head of a ravenous furry someone just looking for the first meal after five months of hibernation.  Heck, the first trip onto my porch, he dragged a plastic flowerpot into the woods to eat (I never found it at least).  The shot from two feet away was the one that finally left me looking at evidence of the sprint whose trailing imprints were separated by ten foot bounds as he headed for a different neck of the woods.

Had I wanted to, I could've stocked a couple freezers with bear meat that night, he was a biggie.  I'm not a hunter and though I was close enough to watch his eyes adjust to the light when he looked up at me, I didn't put a bullet into either one of them.  

Weirdly, I did get a sense of the hunter's primal urge as his breath fogged my door but I don't like killing if it is avoidable and I avoided it that night.

I just got back from a couple hours of trying to protect some apple trees from a stupid porcupine that's sheared maybe 15% of its canopy off this season.  If we don't have to shoot him to make him stop, I'm all for the several weeks of trying that we've invested trying.  

But this problem continually recurs because there are not enough of the only predators, fishers and mountain lions, to control the porcupines.   How does an idealist approach that sort of thing?

by luaptifer on Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 09:25:28 PM EST