[This is a post from http://www.refugeforums.com/, the original post is
here: http://www.refugeforums.com/refuge/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37323 
I liked the content enough to post it up on my website.  I hope it helps
some of you to understand the reasons for hunting].



Yes, I hunt

I got an email from someone here about my last post on hunting.  Not a
nasty one, just a question how I, who seemed to the person to be a
"sensitive" person, could justify killing.

I'm a hunter.  A small part of hunting involves killing.  I don't have
to justify my part in it, but I do realize that in this age when so
many people are removed from the land, from farming, from life, that we
hunters and others who still have that connection to wild life will
have to explain a bit what it is we cherish about this.

Killing is as much a part of hunting as killing is a part of gourmet
cooking, in my view.  Something had to die in order for that chicken or
lamb chop or roast to show up in the store or on my plate. No matter
how far removed one is from the process, one can't escape the fact that
one is responsible for a death.  Not if one is honest with one's self.

But the killing is a small part of cooking, and it's a small part of
hunting.  My post about my son last fall is but a small flavor of what
is involved with outdoor sports.  Human companionship is a bit of the
whole experience.  Being out in nature is another, but hunting is more
than being out in nature, it's also being a part of nature, and whether
you like it or not, predation is part of nature. We're omnivores,
partial predators, too.

There really is no such thing as an omnivore, though.  We're predators,
eaters of living things, all of us.  A vegetarian simply draws the line
in a different place than I in the killing and eating of living
things.  Unless a person eschews eating any living thing, and I don't
know what that person might be called, maybe a nihilarian?, and
extracts food from minerals, one is preying on living matter.

As a hunter, I'm closer to the process than someone who buys meat in a
grocery store.  I participate actively, not passively.  There are
situations where I will kill animals that I don't intend to use for
food, but they are not common.  I don't hunt "varmints," for example,
like coyotes and prairie dogs, but I won't condemn those who do.  I
have no more right to judge where on the spectrum they draw their lines
than I have the right to judge those who are vegetarians or simply
grocery shoppers as "wrong" because they are at a different place on
the spectrum than I.

I would, and have, shot feral cats.  That puts me in the same jeopardy,
I suppose, as the wildlife officer in the post I mentioned a couple
blogs below.  Unlike coyotes, wolves, opossums, foxes, and the like,
feral cats are not part of nature but a destructive by-product of human
stupidity and our propensity to think that a problem we don't see is
not a problem.  People who will not humanely kill a cat, or find a home
for it, but rather leave them loose in the countryside wash their hands
of the killing that cat participates in but do not escape their
culpability.  Feral cats, feral dogs, and also your "tame" cat that you
let loose outside do not, unlike almost all wild animals, kill only for
food.  If you wonder why you see so few songbirds in your neighborhood,
look for cats on the prowl.  They are the #1 predator of ground nesting
birds in the United States.  #1.  And they still "try harder."

Those who live close to nature, farmers and people who don't call
cities their home, can also tell you how many feral animals there are.
Unlike those of us in the city, they see them and they see the
consequences.

Every time that I pull the trigger (or choose not to pull that trigger,
and that happens as often as not) of a gun, I make a decision about
taking a life.  It's a conscious decision, one not taken lightly.  If
you live in a home, you have either killed animals and living things to
build that home, or at the least you have prevented their existence by
maintaining that home.  Where I sit and type this used to be the
habitat for thousands of living creatures, from microscopic to the size
of bison.  They did not cease to live because I sit here, but they were
never allowed to exist so that the floor beneath me might exist.

I believe I have a right to make the decision to kill and eat for
myself.  I believe you do, also.  More than having a right, I believe
we all have a responsibility to consciously make decisions such as
this.  Only then can we truly assess the impact we each have on the
environment.  Only then can we understand how we can affect the
environment positively, or at the least, in the least negative manner
possible.

I don't believe that you, simply because you may be at a different part
of the spectrum than I, have a right to make those decisions for me.
If you don't eat red meat, but eat chicken, fine.  Don't judge my
eating of red meat or expect to be judged by those who will not eat
chicken.  If you eat only vegetable matter and believe that thus you
are more righteous, expect me to ask you about the millions of worms,
rodents, and groundnesting birds whose lives are disrupted or ended by
the plowing of the wheat field from which comes the flour for your
bread.

To expect anything less is hypocritical.

[note...I realize that I'm going to make some people very angry by
posting this, people who will not accept their own role in nature and
will listen to no one who differs from their point of view.  I don't
care, and if you leave acid comments on my site, expect them to be
deleted.  My intended audience here are those who have open minds.  Not
the mindless or intellectually blind.]