Besides being a source of meat, that's also a service to the community. Many natural predators have been killed off and deer breed out of control causing a lot of traffic accidents and deaths.

I wish one of you hunters would come to my neighborhood and take out a dozen raccoons.

I believe most hunters care about the natural way of things. We leave an acre in our timber heavy with brush so the deer have a place to bed down. He leaves the gates open to the hay fields so the deer can get in to feed easier. I know many that plant "feed plots" for the deer to eat so they stay close and easier to hunt, but all the other animals eat there too.
The last 2 and 3 yrs, racoons were at the ultamite high in numbers. Everyone hunted the area hard and this year the numbers are down. They are still out there but they are down and not causing near the troubles that they did a few years ago.
We live 20 miles from the local State Park, I grew up there riding horses. We were raised around the animals, trees and everything that goes on in there including hunting in the park.
Hunting is important to keep the numbers down on many of the wild life. Deer used to really over poppulate the area, I remember it wasn't considered safe to drive through the State Park at night because of the deer poppulation. I know I've popped a couple with my cars in the park.
We hunt and eat what we eat, I have issues with people that hunt and throw the dead animal in a ditch. The only thing I will not eat is coon and possum, they taste nasty (to me).
We joke about the guys going hunting for crow. I got mad at the guys because they took my oldest hunting and they were taking pop shots at crows. I informed them that unless they were going to eat the crow, do not shoot them! Guess who was eating crow for supper the next weekend?
Pidgeons spread diseases and crap all over everything and take over barns. The best thing we can do is keep their numbers down. They can till raise babies and they will be healthier for the lower numbers.
I absulutely love animals, wild and tame. I raise rabbits for pets, show and meat. We have chickens for eggs and hope to have more for meat in the future. All animals deserve to have a good life but all animals are meant to die at some point and all animals are meant to be some one elses food at some point in time.

I was thinking about writing something like that but I didn't want to get people riled up. You put it better than I would have.

Edit to add: I'm in agreement with the crow thing but they are pests like coyotes or rats and different rules apply.

I thought about your comment later in the day and wondered why I didn't talk about that. I think my thoughts were focused on the interacting with nature part. Cleaning and eating the animal is almost an afterthought to the process of hunting and although it adds some intellectual symmetry I'm not sure if it makes the act of killing any more moral.

I don't know. Never hunted, but I fish--and if I'm not going to eat it, it seems a little pointless. Very much an incomplete experience until it's on my dinner plate.



I don't really think it's intellectual symmetry. I think it's respect for the sacrifice of the animal. As well as a healthy dose of waste-not want-not. I wouldn't go to the grocery store and buy a chicken to rot in the back yard, either.

Gah! That came to mind too!

There is some sort of frugality thing involved there and I agree with that but the thought that brought me up short was I couldn't remember the last time I killed a mosquito and ate it.

So if there are better ways to eat so eating isn't the point then what is the point? I think it goes back to what sexym2 got on. We're becoming part of the continuum of life and that helps us be better people.

You all are right on all your thoughts. I preach "want not-wast not" to my kids all the time. I don't think anything of the cleaning and gutting of the animals that we hunt or raise to butcher, its just a fact. We also fish like crazy in the late summer, its an all night thing and takes a couple hours to clean them all in the morning. Its messy but its a fact and one that I don't mind.

Ya, I know crows are a pest but I was trying to teach my son to hunt with purpose not to take pot shots at birds just because "you can." You bet that night, I ate crow and liked it
This late summer I have learned to can with a water bath and a pressure canner. Its been an experiance but one that I love and it goes along with our hunting and raising our own meat/food life. We do our best to not waste, if we can't use it ourselves it goes to the chickens and hogs.

I don't know why but I seriousely dislike people that are lazy hunters.. I've heard of people shooting out of their house, off their porches and out of a truck window. I fully believe they should go out and find the animal, hunt for it, kill it switfly and bring it back for complete use. We even sell the hides of every butcher calf, deer, rabbit and cook that we kill along with using every part. I feed the racoon carcasses to the pigs, great protien for them and its a use for the animals body.
For some reason I get a cheap thrill out of hunting. I am happy as hell when I'm told we got a deer or all the tags have been filled. When we fish we put out trout lines with 13 hooks on it. We stay up all night checking the lines every 2 hours and I love it. The water gets cold with the wind coming across the river but we jump around, laugh about our parts getting froze off and we get our fish. I butcher the rabbits by myself too, I know I am slow doing it by myself but I am happy to do it because it fills the freezer and I can it up for us to eat down the road.

The animals I raise live a good life of full feed and large cages. I presume the wild animals that we hunt have a good life also. Then when we hunt them, they have served their purpose and the food chain keeps going on.

I can't hunt like I used to because of my vision troubles. I still group hunt deer but I don't shoot them, I know I will miss. I will sit in a der stand and as long as they are close enough and I have my trust scope, I'm in good shape. But the rest of the critters are smaller and I dought that I can hunt them, most of the time I can't see a squirll unless it runs across my foot

I actually wondered about eating bugs, but I can't quite bring myself to do that

With mosquitos, you're the one trying not to get eaten. Self defense is always reasonable.

I also killed a rattlesnake years ago (it was in an old log by our dock, and we had too many small children running around in those days). I made the mistake of mentioning it on this forum. I now have a standing promise that if I ever kill another rattlesnake, I'll eat it. I'm not sure that satisfied the person I offended at the time.

If frozen bug patties show up at the supermarket at a reasonable price, I'll try them for sure.

I was told that snake was all white meat.

I like the self defene option, works for me LOL Once you get past the yuck factor and if absolutely needed, I'm sure we could eat bugs. Look at the abandace of a food source not tapped in our culture? In other cultures they eat bugs quite often, we are the nutty ones for killing the bugs and throwing them out, not eating them.

Me and mine were down in Charleston SC about a month ago and they went into a candy and ice cream shop. I'm paying the bill and I see vinegar and salt crickets for sale. So I got some. Very vinegary and dry. Not good.

I don't understand why people get riled up over this. Wild animals have vastly superior lives to those in feedlots. Also -- it's got to be better to die by a single bullet to the head than by being eaten alive by a predator.

I remember as a child my dad had a jar of choc covered ants. I always thought they were raisings or something like that. But looking back, none of kids dared touch them. Did Dad lie to keep us kids out of his goodies or were they really ants? I remembered him warming chocolate on the stove and sticking something on a toothpick into the chocolate.

I was too young to put two and two together.

You can find shrimp balls at the Asian market and crab cakes everywhere. They're pretty much bugs.

Really big, tastey bugs