While on my FB page I noticed this note posted by will know writer and hunter Ron Spomer. Please take the time to read his take on people who are against our sport.
If you are friends with Ron click here:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/ron-spomer/cruel-hunting/1853322586382
Here is the original post (taken from Mr. Ron Spomers FB notes page)
A debate on hunting has energized my personal web page the past few days. Here is a long reply I wrote to one vegan who doesn't want to cause pain or suffering to what she calls "sacred life."
"Our viewpoints may differ, but we arrive at them from the same base — a deep and abiding love for the natural world.
I understand where you're coming from and applaud you for actually thinking about life rather than just rolling along, duh, like so many. And of course you aren't flying solo in your vegan beliefs. I think what bugs most people about vegans is the religious fervor and proselytizing that always seems to go with it. I tend to look at life through the lens of Nature herself and the operating system she (or God, as you choose) set up to create/sustain a healthy ecosystem. And within that system is predation, killing and eating. It's always puzzled me how most vegan folks I know love and praise wolves for their extremely cruel predation on caribou, moose, arctic foxes (they've been documented killing and playing with foxes, then abandoning them,) yet abhor the idea that any human would kill and eat the same animals. We are a product of Life the same as wolves. Why do they get a pass?
To say that we are smarter or have evolved 'above" such brutality seems rather arrogant, implying that we are smarter than God or Nature that created this whole, complicated, wonderful world in which millions of sentient creatures are created and destroyed, usually painfully, every day. The vast majority of human hunters, at least in civilized societies, strive to kill as quickly and humanely as possible. We're the only animal that does so, the only one that cares.
If no human ever killed a single animal again, every animal would still die, most likely violently and in considerable pain because that's Nature's way. Seems to me shooting an animal in the head or heart actually minimizes pain and suffering. Combine this with enlightened "management" in which limits are placed upon hunters (closed seasons, bag limits, no killing of females and fawns, etc.) redoubles the benefits of hunting. Throw in the very real millions upon millions of $ raised by these hunters and used to benefit wildlife and wild places and you end up with a win-win situation, no? More wild habitats, more wild animals thriving in them. The downside to increasing wild animal populations this way, which hunters do, is that you increase the pain and suffering on earth because there are more animals to suffer and die! And they will, with or without human hunters.
Now, I can certainly understand your wanting to minimize pain and suffering and maximize animal populations and their "enjoyment of life." Yet, again, from the lifetime of nature study and research I've done, it appears regulated hunters and hunting programs do just this. For example, if I shoot a deer for my winter's meat supply, I've:
1. Provided/supported natural habitats on which said deer and numerous associated creatures live.
2. Permitted the deer to live its life wild and free, unfenced, un-branded, vaccinated, etc.
3. Permitted other predators their opportunities to kill and eat the deer.
4. Permitted the deer to roam, fight, mate and pass on its genes.
5. Killed the deer as quickly and humanely as I possibly can, preventing it from starving, expiring slowly from disease or being chased, bitten, ripped and torn down by less efficient, natural predators. You don't have to watch much NatGeo TV to see the truth of this. A dozen lions leaping and clawing the back of an elephant calf. Wild dogs eating impala alive.
6. Minimized my carbon footprint by not requiring meat raised in another area, shipped long distances, packaged in plastic, etc.
7. Minimized my carbon footprint by not requiring vegetables grown in mono-cultured fields irrigated with water sucked from salmon streams or natural wetlands that can no longer support the myriad of fish, waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, mink, muskrats and similar species that once thrived in the wild habitats lost to construction of dams, irrigation channels and mono-cultured croplands.
8. Minimized my carbon footprint by not requiring the shipping of vegetables from Chile or California; the electrical energy needed to freezing or can them; the pesticides needed to protect them from insects; the herbicides needed to protect them from weed competition.
9. Minimized the need for vegetable farmers to haze, shoot, and poison mice, rats, ground squirrels, raccoons, deer, etc. to keep them from eating the lettuce, spinach, cabbage, etc. grown for vegetable-eating humans.
9. Recycled into nature the parts of the deer my family did not consume. I watch coyotes, red fox, raccoons, magpies, ravens, chickadees and sometimes even eagles picking the bones of deer and elk after I've trimmed the meat we use. Birds and small mammals use the fur to make their nests. Squirrels and marmots and porcupines gnaw the bones and antlers. Nothing is wasted.
10. If we choose to make gloves, vests, etc from the skin, we minimize our carbon footprint by not demanding products made from non-biodegradable plastics and polyesters made from oil, which involves drilling polluting oil wells, spilling oil in seas, dribbling caustic chemicals into rivers, polluting the air and all the rest of the environmental hazards of the petrochemical industry which makes "man-made fibers" and so-called "green fake fur." As for cotton, you haven't seen a lifeless desert until you've examined a growing cotton field! Absolutely empty, poisoned, useless fields.
A careful examination of Nature shows that hunter-gatherer's killing and eating wild, naturally grown animals and plants are operating within her laws and could do so indefinitely, as we did for millions of years before the advent of agriculture. The system is self sustaining.
On the other hand, our man-made, artificial system of growing non-native, non-natural vegetables that require massive disruption of native habitats and the destruction of competing herbivores flies in the face of Nature's operating system 1.0. Rejecting natural, sustainable, biodegradable fur and leather in favor of non-biodegradable, finite, non-sustainable petro-chemical clothing also defiles Nature.
In addition to hunting and eating locally grown, native wild animals, I also harvest native plants. But (shame on me) I've also grown organic vegetable gardens for more than 40 years. And I've had to fence them from deer, marmots, etc. Rabbits and raccoons have proven impossible to fence out, so I've had to shoot a few of those. Robins attack the strawberries, cedar waxwings nail the cherries, nematodes hit the carrots and potatoes sometimes. Nature is relentless, fecund, feisty and cruel. She insists on creating and destroying life to fuel other life. We can pretend otherwise, but this is reality. Pain and suffering are Nature's way. But we can choose to minimize our role in it, and utilizing natural plants and animals via gathering/hunting does indeed minimize our negative impacts on Nature.
Respect, love and appreciation of Nature is why I have chosen to be a hunter. Thanks for listening."
