Begin Rant...

I was watching some hunting videos on Youtube, and it seemed every video had a comment from someone threatening to ‘call the police’ for ‘animal cruelty’.

These people just have no idea.

First of all, hunting plays a major role in wildlife management. Let me try to put this as simply as possible:

If we stopped hunting deer, their population would explode. Then we’d have far too many deer in a particular area, which would mean too much competition for food, resulting in thousands of deer starving to death. Hunting is set up to keep the numbers at a manageable level. You don’t just walk into the woods and start shooting. You have a strict limit on the number and species of animals you can hunt. If there are ‘x’ number of animals in an area, you can hunt ‘y’ number of them. This keeps the population controlled and not too big or too small.

Secondly, varmint hunting targets vermin. Groundhogs, ground squirrels etc. These are the animals that damage property and tear up crop fields. It’s basically pest control. There’s no difference going out and shooting ground squirrels and setting a mousetrap in your home.

The problem is that too many people have a ‘Disney Movie’ viewpoint of wildlife. Hunters going out and killing poor defenseless animals for the pure joy of killing.

The truth is that most hunters eat what they kill, or at least give their game away to someone who will eat it. All I’m going to say on this topic is that if you’re a meat eater, criticizing hunting is just plain hypocritical. If you’re a meat-eating anti-hunter, I suggest you go visit a commercial chicken farm or slaughterhouse and look at the conditions there.

In simplest terms, hunting is simply ‘free range’ farming. Rather than an animal spending its entire life under florescent lights, being injected with growth hormones and chemical-laced food before being led up a ramp and shot in the head with a bolt-gun…it lives in the wild in its natural environment before being harvested.

Unfortunately too many people are under the delusion that meat comes in vacuum packed boxes from the supermarket. All meat comes from an animal, and just because you buy yours instead of killing it yourself, does not entitle you to the moral high-ground.

Going back to the ‘Disney Movie’ viewpoint, people also think that without hunting people and animals would ‘live in harmony’ while the birds tweet and the squirrels play. They don’t realize that the prices of vegetables would sky rocket because most of the crops would get eaten by vermin, or that their nicely manicured lawns would be torn up while cattle get infected by any number of diseases. Not to mention deer jumping into the road and causing traffic accidents.

What it all comes down to is this: All animals kill other animals to survive. As humans, we’re also animals and part of nature. You or I killing a deer for food is no different than a hawk swooping down and killing a rabbit.

In essence, hunters are nothing but environmentalists. We don’t want our woodland areas spoiled, we don’t want game species wiped out. We just want them controlled.

Finally, just to address the people who do just kill for fun…your average hunter hates those people just as much (if not more) than you do. They’re the minority by which the majority is judged. Comparing an average hunter to someone who blasts away at anything that moves is like comparing a vegetarian to the people who firebomb animal research labs.