Why do so many people find game hunting repugnant, even if you are going to eat the kill afterwards?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you why I don’t like it. It’s because people enjoy it. I fully understand hunting when it’s either that or you don’t eat, and I would do it myself if I had to. But to do it because you like to kill living things is something I just cannot wrap my head around, whether you eat it or not.

Also, calling it a ‘sport’ is flat out ridiculous. In order for it to actually be a sport, the animals would have to know they are playing, and be armed as well.

I agree with @augustlan. There’s an old Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch that comes to mind (“I love animals. That’s why I like to kill them.”)

The people I know who hunt appear to do it for one reason while professing another.

Also, I do a ton of hiking. A few years ago I lived in a town that allowed a ton of hunting. When I went out hiking with my kids, we would have to wear orange vests, and it was far from relaxing. We’d hear shots going off all around us.

I agree with @augustlan, although I must add that I think hunting to get meat is far more benevolent than raising animals in deplorable conditions in order to get meat – at least the animal probably had a good life before you killed it hunting. But it still weirds me out that some people enjoy killing things.

@Mariah I agree with you on the raising and slaughtering of animals under horrible conditions, too. And that makes me a hypocrite, because I eat meat. Just for full disclosure.

Pst….when you go fishing, you are not catching them to bring home and put in an aquarium…...they are coming home for the grill, slikket or oven…..and many love to the process of getting them.

@Hypocrisy_Central I’m not a fan of that, either. Much prefer the idea of catch and release.

Because they don’t like the idea of killing something.

Because they don’t like guns.

If you have ever stood with your eye in the site of a rifle and had a live animal on the other side, you might know.

@augustlan Oh, me too; it wouldn’t be healthy for me to go without meat. We do try to buy local small farm meat when possible, but unfortunately due to the state of the industry that isn’t always possible. And I couldn’t stomach hunting either, so I’m a hypocrite too.

Another cheer for @augustlan .

Let’s start with the recognition here that of all the ways animals are likely to die in the wild, getting a bullet to the heart is arguably not the worst. Most “natural deaths are undoubtedly traumatic.

My problem with hunting (and fishing) is what it does to the hunter. Every act a person commits that intentionally causes suffering to another requires them to stifle their innate voice of compassion. To pull a trigger knowing that this will cause a ball of lead to go ripping through the sensate flesh of a living creature does require just such a stifling of compassion. To do this out of necessity is one thing (and that’s actually quite a hard requirement to meet), but to do it for an adrenaline rush and ego boost is quite another.

People are fundamentally changed by actions such as these. It becomes easier and easier to shut down one’s compassion with practice. That’s not what will make the world a better place.

I was going to answer but @augustlan and @thorninmud said it all better than I could have myself.

I think it all depends on the hunter, really. I haven’t gone hunting in years, but when I did, I didn’t really “enjoy” the hunt. I did it to have extra meat in the freezer. I had to psych myself out to be able to pull the trigger, and I only pulled the trigger when I knew it was going to be a clean shot; I didn’t want to just “wound” the animal and cause suffering. I purposely held off on shooting a beautiful 10 point buck because I didn’t feel like I had a clean one-shot line to him.

I don’t like hunting, just for the sake of the “sport”. It’s not a sport.

I hunt. But we eat what I kill and I feel terrible about it. But what I kill had a good life compared to the shit in your Big Mac. Big fields, no hormones, and freshwater.

My uncle on the other-hand will kill a deer to have its head stuffed and hung in his den while leaving the meat to rot in the woods. He is a huge asshole.

Legal hunters create huge amounts of revenue for conservation efforts through licensing and tagging fees. Hunters also are very useful in thinning populations of animals that have surpassed their environmental carrying capacity, as well as for controlling varmints that cause environmental and economic damage. I’m doing a project on this for my conservation ecology class and I’ve learned that hunting has numerous economic and ecological benefits that many people tend to ignore, thanks to the bambi effect.

Question for the hunters here:

Can you get bacon from feral hogs or wild boars?

Yes @Brian1946 you can, and you can even buy it at Cabela’s .

No I don’t hunt, but I don’t mind eating food that has been hunted, and I love bacon.

@Brian1946 you can, but it’s a bitch to process because it takes a long time and it’s very difficult to do. The meat will go bad quickly if you don’t process it pretty much immediately, and it is often filled with all kinds of nasty bacteria and parasites.

You can make bacon from it though. Same way you make bacon from regular pigs.

I don’t hunt, but I could if I was hungry enough. I think it would be very hard for me to kill an animal like that, but I’m glad that there are others who want to do it.
I know the benefits that hunting can provide and I know it can be a very good thing.
I love having a freezer full of fresh venison, it’s lean and healthy meat.

As a hunter, I think @augustlan has a skewed idea of what hunting it about. The killing and the processing afterwards, are necesarry but are not the primary reason I hunt. They are not the most enjoyable parts of the hunt. In fact for me the kill signals the end of the hunt.

The best part of the hunt is being out in the woods and fields watching the animals and plants. Learning where they go, where they sleep, where they water, where they eat. Taking the human predator totally out of the natural cycle is usually more harmful to the ecology of a region than not.

@WestRiverrat: “The best part of the hunt is being out in the woods and fields watching the animals and plants.”

This is by far the most puzzling – and disturbing – to me. I hear this from many people I know who hunt (“I love the outdoors.”). Is it possible to be experience nature without killing something? What about bringing a camera, a notebook – or just your awareness?

@tom_g pictures and notes don’t feed me, and 90% of the time I don’t kill anything.

@WestRiverrat I have a feeling that a lot of people really don’t understand hunting because they have a skewed view of it for one reason or another. No, I don’t doubt that some people have genuine moral issues with it, but I do think that a lot of people developed their views based on stereotypes or negative portrayals of hunting and hunters. Hunting in the US transcends economic class and other variables. There is no paradigm of “the hunter” out there. Just look at fluther. I’m a hunter, @WestRiverrat is, Incendiary_Dan is, and so on. We are all over the spectrum, and it would do a lot of good to approach us with an open mind and with preconceptions checked at the door.

Relevant.

For the record, I do believe that the problems with our current system of food production (factory farming) are morally reprehensible. I have no moral objection to hunting animals for food, and I could put together a coherent argument that would present hunting as a more ethical approach to food production.

That said, the hunters I know are not the organic, free-range, grass-fed, anti-factory farming activists that hunt for their meat. They hunt for fun and meat during certain seasons, but have relatively little to say about their other food consumption.

Sure, it depends on the hunter. However, the people I know are not going to go to the farmer’s market to buy their organic, local produce, and then go hunt for their dinner. It’s a hobby. It’s for fun. And it appears to the outsider (me) that these people are using some thinly-veiled arguments about “loving nature” to justify the feeling of killing something. Note: I am not claiming that all hunters (including the people here) are doing this. It just appears to be this way because the rest of their actions do not support the ethical arguments they use to justify their hunting.

I know people who say that they really go hunting to “enjoy the outdoors”. All I ask of them is to investigate why they are require a gun to enjoy those outdoors. I suspect for some of them, the reasons are not as noble as they profess.

Of all of the ways to kill wild animals, hunting is not the worst.

I am against killing wild animals though, unless there is an overabundance (or a very healthy abundance) of them in the wild.

I think there are way too many humans, and they (ab)use way too much of the land.

My main complaint is that hunting (deer hunting in particular) seems like reverse Darwinism. Hunters want to take out the biggest and strongest. Every hunter I know is out to get the biggest deer possible. It’s bragging rights. I live in Wisconsin, where opening weekend of deer hunting season is almost a holiday. Hunters talk about the importance of thinning the herd (which I agree), but then complain about “Buy a Buck” programs that require the shooting of doe’s before bucks. They wouldn’t bitch about the one that got away, or the fact that they didn’t get one this year if it was all about population maintenance.

I have hunted, and I hated every minute of it. But where I came from it’s a rite of passage for boys to kill their first deer. So my repulsion of hunting might be skewed by personal experience.

I wonder if hunting supporters are also skewed in their beliefs by the notion of family, tradition and heritage? As in “this is what I do cause my daddy taught me, and I love my daddy.” or “my folk have always done this. It’s what good folk do.”

Are there people who come to hunting later in life? Or is it something you had to grow up doing, and therefore have less objectivity?

Also, hunting is an expensive hobby, so the idea that one has to hunt to put food on his family’s table is kind of ridiculous.

Hunting isn’t as easy as some might think. A person can, and do, go days without seeing anything or getting a shot . Just because a person has a rifle it doesn’t mean it guarantees a kill. If a person appreciates eating meat than they also appreciate the game taken out in the woods isn’t packed full of growth hormones and other commercial “enhancements”. So far I haven’t seen evidence that legal hunting is causing any species to become extinct.. There is also an unfair stereotype foisted on outdoor sportsmen that isn’t helping anything.

Horses are a prime example of what happens when people legislate with their hearts instead of their heads.

It is illegal to kill wild horses, but they are an invasive nonnative species that is destroying the habitat. They are left to reproduce without control, which leads to overpopulation, they drive out native animals and compete for the same forage. Mule deer share the same land, but they can’t compete with the larger more aggressive horses that drive them off and eat the food.

The only predator in the North American continent that can consistently take them on is man.

Just to clarify, I know hunters aren’t evil people (or at least, not any more evil than non-hunters). I do think that whole “enjoying the outdoors/it’s the hunt not the kill” thing is complete bullshit, though. Killing is not necessary to either of those pursuits. Take a hike, stalk an animal with your camera.

@augustlan As a “former” hunter (I may or may not hunt again, I don’t know), I agree that “I hunt because I love the outdoors” thing is a crock. I do love the outdoors (in the Spring and Fall, lol) but that’s not why I hunted. I hunted for meat. Deer, dove and quail. Not because I wanted to “commune with nature” or anything like that, but because I wanted to eat something besides my typical chicken and beef.

And anyone who knows deer season knows that it’s usually pretty damn cold, sitting there in the deer stand… so I can’t actually claim to have loved the outdoors then at all. I would freeze my ass off with a can of Sterno between my feet and be miles away from anything resembling a bathroom, forcing me to potty in a bush. The outdoors were a real bitch during deer season. =0)

I’m a vegetarian and I actually think hunting is much more respectable than buying meat…I don’t support hunting as a ‘sport’ whatsoever but if the hunter is hunting for something they are going to eat, I don’t really have any qualms about it.

Actually, the whole slaughterhouse and mass killing of animals disturbs me a lot more than hunting, mostly over how excessive it is. But I guess it’s a necessity, since people gotta eat, and we got big cities and all.
Still, MacDonald’s, fuck you.
I don’t have much of a problem with hunting if you plan to eat it. At least you’re not wasting the animal. If some guy tells me his moose head hanging in the garage belonged to a moose that he actually ate, then cool. Morbid, but eh.

But people just doing it for sport, well, ya like what ya like, and there’s people all around us that are equally mean spirited and violent but don’t do any hunting. Still, I really don’t like the whole sport idea. That can say a lot about that person.
There’s these two dudes I know that do regular hunting. They usually go for deer or moose. Well on one trip, they failed to nab the moose they were after. But they found a partridge. One guy was telling us how he shot it multiple times until it really wasn’t anything anymore. He was laughing his ass off and everything as he was describing it.

Yeah, you’re a real fuckin hero. This is the kinda stuff that makes me dislike hunting for sport.

Then again, as a child, I used to wanna be an entomologist. I’d catch bugs, and impale them, attempting to emulate professionals. I probably have nothing to say lol.

Tried hunting once. Got killed by Arnold Scwharzeneger. Damn jock ambushed me with a bow and arrow while covered in mud.

I live in the backwoods of Pennsylvania and we have many hunters. From my experience, the thing they most love is being out in the woods and deer camp. Frankly, I don’t get it but, during hunting season the talk in the lunchroom is about recipes for deer meat, and funny accident that happened during the hunt or at camp. I have never heard them discuss enjoying the kill, to them it is just a part of the process. The main thing they seem to enjoy is the companionship, the hunt, and the cooking.

Like I said, sleeping in a camp with a bunch of guys that were drinking and farting all night, then getting up before dawn to trudge around in the mud and cold has no appeal, whatsoever to me.

@mazingerz88 Holy smokes!! That was you? The “really ugly mother(insert word that rhymes with trucker)” I always thought you more robotic than with mandibles Har har har!

@Hypocrisy_Central I laughed. :D