It may be a given that for many (if not most) American ruralites, hunting season is their favorite time of year. Like pumpkins at Halloween or colored lights at Christmastime, camo, orange vests and empty beer cans are symbolic of the season. But don’t let the PR puff about self-sufficiency or sustainability fool you, this celebration is strictly motivated by the thrill they get from killing.
Few, if any, western hunters actually need to “harvest” wild “game” to survive in the modern world. It’s all about the “sport” these days, and perhaps for some, outdated “tradition.” It’s never made more clear than when you pull up to a gated logging road in your muddy, decades-old light pickup to look for mushrooms and find yourself parked between a pair of shiny new $50,000.00, ¾ ton mondo trucks, just off the showroom floor—their owners out for a day of hunting. That $50 grand would go a long way toward feeding a hungry family, if that was really the reason for their vicious exploits.
Want more proof that they don’t really need the deer or elk meat to survive? For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to get ahold of the local construction company to have a load of gravel delivered before the rainy season makes my driveway impassable to anyone without a 4×4. Finally, the owner of the company returned my call and sheepishly confessed that he’s been away on “vacation” (no second guesses doing what) and since returning, hasn’t been able to reach any drivers. “They’re all out hunting,” he explained, expecting me to understand.
Well, the problem is, the elk and deer are the only neighbors I consider my true friends. Sorry, but I’m not too understanding when I hear that folks can afford to take time off from high-paying trucking jobs to go on weeks-long trips to murder my friends.
It’s clearly just a sport to them, not a matter of survival.
Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2014. All Rights Reserved
Exposing the Big Game 
Instead of distorting wilderness ecology by farming game animals for hunter “conservationists” to “manage” in the wild and “managing” predators we should have game farms where “sportsmen” can make an appointment and go shoot “their elk” or their deer; maybe even have it processed and packaged right there. If supermarkets would be allowed to put game in the meat sections, if not then game stores and game stores allowed to sell it, then those who just want the meat could dress up in orange and go to grocery or game store and get their meat and fill their freezers. The wilderness could be left wilderness. For those who just enjoy being out there, they can take a hike, maybe with a camera. For those who really just like the killing, the game ranch could satisfy that desire. Maybe we could even expand on that need by allowing those people to come out to ranches and shoot their own cow or sheep or pig and strangle their own chicken or turkey. For those who are justifying their wildlife killing as conservationists, we could put them to work convincing public land leases to give back the land to wildlife and wilderness. For those who need to dress up in camouflage or orange, they could try paintball. There are other avenues of satisfaction for frustrated Elmer Fudd Nimrods and Jeremiah Johnson Wannabes such as orienteering, hiking to the back country and back with jerky from the grocery in their pack, survivalist type races and obstacle courses, and video games, rifle and archery ranges.
And, sadly, these guaranteed-kill hunting ranches where people pick their animal targets from catalogs, exist all over the country, adjacent to wilderness areas that are also hunted, and covering such wide swaths of habitat that there’s often little left in terms of sanctuary. It’s all so imbalanced.
Unbelievable.
Modern day management is not conservation. If you think so you completely miss what should be the point of wildlife mismanagement, now mismanagement of wildlife ecology, mismanagement of other predators. The main thing that modern management has done is to stop the wanton, wholesale slaughter going on before regulated hunting; it was the hunters that have been somewhat “managed” else almost nothing would be left; and that is primarily what should be managed now. State wildlife agencies should not be farming ungulates for hunters and marginalizing the predators for hunters and killing wolves for hunters and ranchers. Another primary thing that has been done is creation of refuges, national parks, some protections for national forests and public land. The current ongoing battles are opposing the hunter and rancher war on wildlife, development pressures, extraction industries pressures, rancher leases and extraction industry leases of public land, destruction of habitat. Hunting is not conservation. Hunting is a continuing war on wildlife.
Jim, you failed to mention the huge 5th-wheel trailers they haul behind their mongo trucks, so they don’t have to miss any of the comforts of home.
Reblogged this on Wolf Is My Soul.
It is all about the killing. I do not understand this killing frenzy. I have a former co-worker who by accounts seems fairly OK but deer season — you can see the frenzy bubbling up and then the endless talk about the upcoming experience, the aftermath and the reliving of it for weeks. Even will drive around and show the carcass to any one who will look. Sure doesn’t need this critter to die. Got a job and eats lots store bought dead animals. Will talk about how it was too easy and some one will say, well, did you let him go? No. I shot him. And this isn’t a drunken slob hunter — obeys the “rules.” But all of it is so heinous. So cruel and pointless and psychotic. Won’t shoot an elk but has it in for deer — and raccoons on the porch. Very nasty. And it is the mildest of the nasty out there. Keep shining the light into the dark corners, Jim.
Sentient beings are neither “game,” nor “trophies.” The humanoid creatures who engage in technology aided slaughter are not “hunters.” There hasn’t been any “hunting” in hundreds of years. The killers are just sociopathic-psychopathic kill addicts getting their rocks off and their “highs” on. Their brains “enjoy” a dopamine – TESTOSTERONE rush in the absence of sufficient serotonin. The result is a “high” just like any other brain chemistry altering method produces – and one with sexual overtones. That is the real fascination with slaughter. The same is true of many who work with animals in the farm-hells and slaughter-hells on the planet.
Our wildlife has been treated as though we were watering and fertilizing poppy fields for heroin addicts – but the camouflage blanket of the lie of “hunting” has been torn off. It isn’t at all about “hunting.” It is only about “killing” and that killing is done using the cumulative intellectual and technological product of millions – tens of millions of humans – and it’s used against a v 1.0 sentient being.
The slaughtered sentient is a member of a species that has been under constant attack by kill addicts. For generations, humanoids have stolen the lives of wildlife’s best and brightest to appease their own sickness. The victim species are weakened by air pollution and water pollution, ever smaller habitats, and ever greater intrusions by humans. They get weaker in the face of ever improving, lab tested, human technology.
There is neither honor, nor tradition, in any of this. There is only human mental illness. That is all. A good primer on the mental health aspects can be found in “The Sociopath Next Door” which is less than $10 on Amazon. Life for a great many whose lives are damaged by sociopaths in many ways will benefit from reading it. Killing isn’t the only area in which sociopathy – psychopathy shows up. Increased family violence increased with animal abuse – and you can’t get more abusive than kill addiction.
All the comments are spot on !
The societal world is not set up for the lovers it’s for the fighters, the haters ..and it’s all about war of one kind or another. Or so it seems …
It’s all a killing field they seem highly entitled to .. Where did this entitlement begin in America? When we stole the land from the Native Americans who were amazing caretakers and lovers of the land and you boys came and you ‘settled ‘ the land we stole .. Isn’t it all settled out now boys ? Can’t you just come home now and settle down and let the highly organized and intricately balanced wild beings live their lives in peace?
They are the caretakers of our earth, our soil, our water. Hunters are not conserving anything as they always claim, they are in fact ruining everything .. We know ecosystems need the wild to breathe and live, they are the ecosystem engineers. Are we still so ignorant in 21st century not to know this rudimentary school lesson ?
Speak up always for the truth
Hunting is not the truth
It is a big bloody lie.
The Earth our home deserves better and we know better
Keep it up Jim !
Expose the big game !
Joy, that is an astute understanding, spot-on and scary as all hell.
..serial murder..by serial killers..as an animal lover and vegan, I am so sickened that I cannot form sentences..only *tears*…
Killing God’s voiceless creatures is dispicable, and the people who do this, should be the one’s hunted. Disgusting! No excuse — unless this is your only means of food.