Successfulhunting.com

This article is spot on and a very good argument against the anti-hunting community. I agree with everything said in this article and actually have found myself using arguments that are parralleled in this article. My favorite part is when the author says if he loved just killing animals he would buy a carton of chickens to beat with a bat! This type of behavour is obviously not what hunting is about, have a read:

"PUBLICATION: The Kingston Whig-Standard
DATE: 2009.01.02
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Editorial/Opinion
PAGE: 5
ILLUSTRATION: 1.
BYLINE: L. W. OAKLEY
COLUMN: THE OUTDOORS
WORD COUNT: 112

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Why many urban Canadians are against hunting

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Imagine you’re in a slaughterhouse. You’re standing in front of a chicken hanging from a hook upside down by its feet. It’s squawking loudly and flapping its wings, frantically trying to escape.

You ask the chicken, "Why are you making such a commotion?"

This chicken can talk, so it replies, "Please help me. I don’t want to die."

Then you say, "But I’m going to eat you."

In your wildest imagination, do you think that chicken would answer you by saying, "Why didn’t you say so? I didn’t know you wanted to eat me. Go ahead. Slit my throat."

No animal wants to die. Not a single factory-farm animal would willingly give its life so you can put a chicken wing on the grill or a leather coat on your back.

About one billion, 300 million chickens are killed worldwide for food each year. It’s hard to comprehend killing at that level. Put simply, it means 2,500 chickens are killed every minute, all day, every day, all year, every year, because people like eating them.

The truth is that most people aren’t opposed to killing animals. Otherwise they would stop eating meat and wearing leather. People are

opposed to doing the killing. They prefer to pay for the deaths of the animals they consume. They don’t want blood on their hands or on their conscience. They do their hunting on the meat aisle in the grocery store but take no responsibility for killing. They look away and let someone else do it for them.

Before you can condemn hunting, you must first look in the mirror and ask yourself, "How can I justify being directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of animals that will be killed during my lifetime because I want to eat or wear them?"

You can’t condemn one and justify the other.

But people do. Why?

People condemn hunting not because it involves killing but rather because they believe that hunters enjoy killing.

If I hunted because I enjoyed killing, I wouldn’t hunt at all. I would just buy a crate of chickens and beat them to death with a baseball bat. It would be much cheaper and far easier.

To be a hunter, you must have a clear conscience about killing and must possess the will to kill. If you want to call yourself a hunter, sooner or later you will have to kill a wild animal. You can’t look away. It’s no accident that you look down the barrel of a gun before pulling the trigger.

On a moose-hunting trip near Espanola in Northern Ontario, seven of us hunted out of a tent for a week. We shared a single tag for one bull moose. We saw four moose cows up close that week and didn’t fire a single shot. We weren’t there to kill. That’s why it’s called hunting.

The average deer hunter kills one deer every three to four years. I know a man who hunted for 25 years before killing his first deer. Don’t forget: No chicken ever escapes the slaughterhouse.

To me, meat-eating anti-hunters seem intolerant by nature. Listen carefully when they speak. Their message sounds like this: "If everyone was like me, the world would be a better place."

When my publisher was reviewing the manuscript for my hunting book, they sent it to an editor to read and review. The editor was a Buddhist vegetarian woman working at a Canadian university. At first she didn’t want to read the manuscript and returned it to the publisher, saying, "This book is about hunting. I can’t read it. I wouldn’t even kill a fly."

But she did read and recommend it for publication. Later she wrote me a letter saying that the book opened her eyes about hunting and taught her to be more tolerant of others.

Maybe we could all be a little more tolerant. Perhaps then the world would be a better place.

Our human character was formed in the hunting and gathering stage of evolution. Hunting is the foundation of humankind. We are all descendents of successful hunters. Even though there are 3 1 /2 million square miles of wilderness in Canada, two-thirds of our population lives in cities.

Many city people are anti-hunters. They have lost touch with nature and the natural world. They sleep in subdivisions, drive SUVs, sit in work pens, talk on cellphones, eat fast food, watch TV, play with computers and take pills to feel better.

Hunting wild animals is perfectly natural. It’s a part of our heritage, a way of life, a state of mind and a symbol of democracy. * L. W. Oakley lives in Kingston and is the author of Inside The Wild, available at the publisher’s website, www.gsph.com."

 

I hope you found it as interesting and well written as I did,

cheers!