Hunters Unethical?

[Eli Cash]

I just had to edit a scathing opinion piece about hunting that I have a problem with.

Here's the deal:
I am NRA, 2nd Amendment all the way! I LOVE firearms and shooting paper and who ever threatens me and mine. I read lots of Guns and Ammo type magazines and finally kinda snapped this morning after another image of some jack-wagon trophy hunters with a bear so far out in the bush they aint bringing much of it back, pure pleasure kill; and they smile.

Now I wasn't so opposed to hunting until I became a field geologist and spend ~70 days a year in the back country in the west; CA,AZ,UT,WY, NV, TX, NM, AK. Out there with out trying in the least and generally making noise to scare the bears, javelina and moose away I routinely find myself within <20 meters of; antelope, deer, big horn sheep, various fowl etc.. not to mention bear, moose and the more scary critters.

To a one of hundreds of such encounters I have had over the years, the animal is gentle and curious. Even the bears have been cool. The encounters usually last 10-30 seconds sometime more before animal looses interest and moves on or continues to graze. I can't recall one bolting almost ever. Sure I've made undue noise and scared more away and just hear them or catch a hoof in the air as it clears a hurdle but again I'm making noise!

My point is where is the challenge? It's like "hunting" the neighbors dog. I get a mix of disgust and humor while at the local sporting goods as some hunter is buying deer urine and the rest of the "stuff" that is deemed necessary to out fox an animal. When the real challenge is to become more part of nature as opposed to robbing it.

Hey I wouldn't say anything if trophy hunting wasn't held in some regard. Frankly "hunting" is not the proper term it's just shooting and killing, just like Buffalo Bill and those easterners slaughtering buffalos from train cars. Takes zero skill or intelligence. My 12 year old niece in Alabama bagged a deer….

It's a real quandary for me… I gotta find a vegan shooters forum or magazine.

Please take my remarks as just my passion. I don't want to try to be politically correct and not step on toes. One of the cool things I noticed over the years is shooting folks can take it and won't get undies in a wad but let me have it with their opinion.

I'm gonna need some help off this soap box…dang it is high

EC

[shortwave]

First, would like to Welcome you to TFL.

Second, I find it ironic that your first post here on the hunting forum is a rant and refers to hunters as 'Jack Wagons' or referring to hunters as no more then people that enjoy killing .

Third, I'm sure you will get the responses you are apparently searching for.

[markj]

Go shoot at te range, no animals there. I hunt live animals for the meat. Trophys mean nothing to me. Not all hunters are trophy shooters.

[Paul B.]

Seems to me that at least most of the time you've been out well before most hunting seasons and seeing undisturbed animals. When I'm lucky enough to draw a tag for deer or elk I'm out and about 3 or 4 days scouting before the season opener. I see lots of animals and filling my tag would be a breeze but highly illegal.
Usually the day before the opener when most of the so called "Jack Wagons" are flooding the area, setting up camps and chopping or sawing up firewood, the animals note the change and go into hiding. Even on the two wilderness hunts I've done the animals wise up when us "Jackwagons" show up.
Try an elk hunt in Area 1 here in Arizona sometime. It's been said that if you don't score the first day, odds are you'll never score the rest of the season. Once that first shot echoes over the hills and canyons, the elk head for the White Mountain Apache Reservation when hunting pressure is very light due to the very expensive prices for the hunts. Been there and done that way too many times. I've seen hunts where there was literally a hunter behind every tree, rock and shrub. Cow Mountain in Lake County California comes to mind and that was back in 1965, or Jarbridge in northeastern Nevada as but two examples. You might find it easier to sneak up on an animal during hunting season on private ground but I seriously doubt it'll happen on public land.
Paul B.

[Jo6pak]

I also see lots of animals in the wilds.........until I am actually hunting them.
They seem to know when I mean them harm

[southjk]

I am a lover of guns as well but I'm not a hunter. You will be welcome here on this forum but probably more so in other sub forums not related to hunting. Make yourself at home there but here in The Hunt you are just going to make a lot of people angry, especially if you insult them or the sport they enjoy.

[AllenJ]

I know lots of people who enjoy shooting but don't hunt. Most are very good people and I enjoy shooting with them and while doing so I don't tell them any of my hunting stories because I know they don't care to hear them. In that spirit I expect the same from them, they don't like to hunt but don't tell me why because I do like to hunt, and we get along fine because of it. In your case I don't have any problem that you don't like to hunt, I do however challenge you to buy the tag, make the shot, and take care of the meat, then tell me how easy it is. During the hunting season game animals tend to make themselves very hard to find on public lands. Welcome to the forums sir and I look forward to reading some of your shooting posts.

[huntinaz]

Are you opposed to any type of hunting, or just what you assume is trophy hunting i.e. bear?

It's a real quandary for me… I gotta find a vegan shooters forum or magazine.

Are you vegan?

[Eli Cash]

Hi guys,

I'm sorry this was my first post here! What a way to start. I thought I had posted a few before…sorry..should introduced myself more politely.

Once again I'll say I want to come a cross as honest but passionette. In the end as gun folks we have to sick together.

I'm a "vegetarian" and will eat meat when presented from "hunters". Last I had was actually some Elk as a matter of fact. Native American shot the one and used the ENTIRE animal for something.

I'm 100% against the American meat industry.

Thanks for being so cool in your responses and giving me a break. As I said if I had come up with a hunting rant on a PETA type site it would have caused enough issues to have me banned.

Unfortunately I just speak from my heart, and yes it gets me in trouble

I'll be back…

EC

[buck460XVR]

Hunting itself is not unethical. It may not be as sporting or as challenging as you may think it should be, but then depending on when and where you are will make a difference in how animals react to humans. We did not get to be an advanced species or have the intelligence to become field geologists from eating veggies. Science has told us it was meat and it's protein that gave us the brain power to advance ourselves. Before the advent of firearms, getting that meat was a challenge. While we no longer NEED to hunt to feed ourselves in today's society here in the lower 48, hunting is still necessary to control animal populations. In many cases it is a necessary evil and hunting is the most humane and ethical way to do it. It is also a huge money maker and recreational past-time. There are plenty of folks that don't hunt and plenty that do. There are plenty of folks like you that enjoy just seeing animals in their natural environment. Hopefully there will always be room for all of us.

[Mainah]

My wife says we're vegetarians with benefits because we eat meat a few times a year, and only when we know where it came from. Personally I don't support factory farming. but that's just my choice.

I see deer almost every day, until they're in season.

[alex0535]

I consider harvesting my own meat far more ethical than going to the grocery store and buying meat that was raised in unknown and likely bad conditions and then butchered in almost as much of a questionable manner.

A wild animal lived its life never knowing the hand of man being fed whatever was deemed suitable it's entire life, living in captivity in the most animal dense manner possible, pumped full of anti biotics so the terrible conditions are survivable. Raised for slaughter. A wild animal lived its life free, eating whatever it wants.

If your going to eat meat, what is the more ethical option?

I don't hunt for the challenge, or the trophy. I hunt animals to put meat on the table because I consider it more ethical than the meat at the grocery store.

I consider myself an opportunistic hunter for whatever game meat is in season. Sure I could drive up to the wilderness, hike miles through the mountains and try to take a black bear, hog, or whitetail and then try to get the meat out of there but that is a lot more effort than going out to the back of our property, sitting in a tree and waiting for a deer that I can shoot, throw on the golf wagon and have it butchered and in a cooler to bleed out in an hour. At the end of the day a deer taken in the wilderness and a deer taken in the back yard look the same when its in the freezer, but one requires a lot less difficulty in putting it there.

If I wanted a challenge I would hike into the wilderness with a bird dog and try to kill a grouse. An experienced bird hunter is doing good if they can kill more than one a day.

[idek]

To the OP, one can question the ethics all sorts of decisions.

Is shooting animals for meat less ethical than buying meat that came from animals raised in captiviy?

Is a vegetarian diet actually doing animals any good? I live in south dakota. Pheasant populations are on the decline because long-standing grasslands, tree lines, and creeks are becoming corn fields. The production of that vegetable has become more profitable than the hunting business (which has traditionally been a large part of the state's economy).

So yes, hunters kill animals. The business of hunting also results in the maintenance of some wildlife habitats on which that business depends. Studies will show that habitat has much more to do with wildlife proliferation than hunting does. What's better: 25 square miles of habitat where pheasants aren't hunted, or 100 square miles of habitat where they are hunted?

If your concern is not so much about population size, but rather about simply harming a living creature, there are reasons hunting seasons are typically in the fall. One of them is that winter is hard on animals. The population capacity of an area goes way down. Animals need more energy in the winter to stay warm and to navigate through snow. And yet, the bare trees of winter offer little food or cover. A large percentage of most wildlife populations will die during the winter. Hunting in the fall reduces populations a little bit, and generally results in healthier winter populations since there is less competition among the remaining individuals. A certain number of individuals WILL DIE one way or another. Is falling victim to a hunter's bullet more cruel than death by starvation or freezing?

I'm not a fan of hunters who shoot every critter that ambles by just because they feel like it. And I'm sometimes a little put off by trophy hunters who act they've accomplished a great feat after a guide led them straight to an animal and all they had to do was shoot. But hunting as a whole does most people--and I might even say many animals--more good than harm.

[tahunua001]

well I tackled the many aspects of hunting for my term paper in my research writing class last semester.
just some of the advantages that I ran across in my research.
1. hunted meat is better for you. one of the fastest growing fads these days is eating "organic' food. animal welfarists are opting to eat meat that comes from animals that don't come from industrialized meat farms and have minimal exposure to fattening diets and pharmaceuticals. wild animals are just the next step up on the healthy meter. they naturally regulate their body weight and eating so that they don't have the disproportionately high fat content that your average domesticated animal meat contains.

2. animals have the natural instinct to avoid predators. at some point or another, every animal will encounter a predator, it is almost an inevitable end for wild animals to be eaten by another animal. they are born with instincts that help them to evade game. hunting rather than domesticating is a more humane alternative for food consumption because the animal is able to draw on it's instincts to escape than than being forced to live a life of captivity and then taken to a place where the inevitable result is death.

3. for the people that don't eat what they kill, they still maintain the populations. mankind is a horrible group of meddlers and usually when we meddle we muck things up bad. we kill off plants that we think are weeds or we kill off predators because they are harmful to livestock and other species are unable to cope so their populations begin to explode when the natural balance is upset. so now mankind has to regulate populations by becoming the predators whether we want the meat or not. states regulate by limiting tags, too much predation will increase limits on tags, not enough and restrictions will be lifted. whether you eat the meat or not you are still contributing to help manage that wildlife population.

4. whether you harvest an animal or not, you still affect the environment in different ways. a blind hunter will generally affect a smaller area but generally hurt soil by hard packing the same small areas and trails, but do serve to increase plant life diversity in that smaller area by spreading seeds that attache to their boots and clothing. roaming hunters affect a much broader area and have the opposite effect, they help the soil by pressing decaying plant life into the soil for decomposition but the seeds are generally broadcast too far away to help the species spread for more than a single generation.

I won't bore you with the entire 12 page paper and all of my sources but that's some of the points I found most interesting and more relevant to your post.

[Rembrandt]

Hunting doesn't always fit each persons definition of ideal.....many things happen that make the outcome less than perfect.

Native American tribes often drove bison herds over cliffs to their death because it was the most efficient and effective way to hunt. Wasting far more animals than they needed or could use. Not entirely ethical, but it's the way things happened.

[spaniel]

Come back and say it's just shooting after you've actually gone out and tried to do it. In my hunting group we've had 8 elk tags over 4 years, and only two of them were filled. And we covered a lot of territory.

How nice of you to just assume they wasted that bear. I shot my first elk 10 miles from the truck, and we got out every scrap we could scrape off the animal.

[Mainah]

Tahunua, I'll bet that was a good paper.

[Pahoo]

Now I wasn't so opposed to hunting until I became a field geologist and spend ~70 days a year in the back country in the west;

I'm a "vegetarian" and will eat meat when presented from "hunters".

After reading your initial post, I thought to myself that there was something else working here, that was confirmed with your follow-up. Understand that you are entitled to all of those feeling, It's the judgment that I always have a problem with. ....

I have seen more than my share of stupid "Drunks" but I still enjoy a cold beer. On being a Vegan; well again, that is your personal call and sadly, in our society our meals revolve around meat when it should revolve around vegetables.

I also share your dislike of what I call poachers and at the end of this Great Adventure, do you want to be measured by the best that you have done or by the worse? As a hunter, I certainly don't want to be measured by other's actions nor my worse ones. I have a past history of not being an ethical hunter and that is one reason I became a hunter safety instructor and teach hunter ethics. I am aware of most of the dirty tricks. ...

Welcome aboard and I envy your work !!!

Be Safe !!!

[RaySendero]

Eli Cash wrote: Hunters Unethical?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I just had to edit a scathing opinion piece about hunting that I have a problem with.

Here's the deal:
I am NRA, 2nd Amendment all the way! I LOVE firearms and shooting paper and who ever threatens me and mine. I read lots of Guns and Ammo type magazines and finally kinda snapped this morning after another image of some jack-wagon trophy hunters with a bear so far out in the bush they aint bringing much of it back, pure pleasure kill; and they smile.

Now I wasn't so opposed to hunting until I became a field geologist...

Well...Let see:

Seems to me it should be unethical for a writer to edit something that he knows nothing about!?

[Dc777]

He used the "v" word for vegan, aka Liberal promoting his agenda. Your in the wrong place buddy. I've never been a trophy deer hunter as I can't boil and eat the antlers, and I've never killed a bear. But hinting at hunters being bad people isn't going to fly in this section of the forum. If you want to hunt carrots, go for it, but we are hunters here, and most of us aren't tree hungers. Best of luck finding ' vegan' hunters... My guess is go to hollyweird.

[tahunua001]

Tahunua, I'll bet that was a good paper.

I think I only got a B for it.

[Kreyzhorse]

With all due respect, until you've hunted, taken the life of an animal, felt the body cool as you cleaned it and then fed your family and friends with the flesh, your criticism is without merit.

With that said, this forum caters to all kinds of shooters so if you can actually contribute, there are lots of opportunities for you to do so in the handgun or rifle sections.

[tahunua001]

I am interested by how personal this thread is being taken. I have seen a number made by people who do not agree with hunting, eating meat, ETC, none were so respectfully critical of hunting as this one. the OP has even gone so far as to limit it to trophy hunters rather than meat hunters, yet everyone else just seems to read the words "hunting is unethical, and hunters are bad".

[Kreyzhorse]

Takes zero skill or intelligence. My 12 year old niece in Alabama bagged a deer….

Tahunua, I understood the OP is discussing trophy hunting, however trophy or meat hunting is still "hunting".

"Zero skill or intelligence" isn't a ringing endorsement of any hunter in my opinion so yes, insulting the forum won't win you many friends here.

[Snyper]

the OP has even gone so far as to limit it to trophy hunters rather than meat hunters, yet everyone else just seems to read the words "hunting is unethical, and hunters are bad".

That's funny because in the post I read he even talked bad about his 12 year old neice.

I don't see how adding the prefix "trophy" changes his obvious attitude about hunters and hunting

Hey I wouldn't say anything if trophy hunting wasn't held in some regard. Frankly "hunting" is not the proper term it's just shooting and killing, just like Buffalo Bill and those easterners slaughtering buffalos from train cars. Takes zero skill or intelligence. My 12 year old niece in Alabama bagged a deer….

I didn't see any explanations as to why you have to be smarter if you're hunting for the meat.