A letter from a hunter published in recent issue of Field & Stream.
Isn’t hunting a great “sport?”
Exposing the Big Game
Forget Hunters' Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior
A letter from a hunter published in recent issue of Field & Stream.
Isn’t hunting a great “sport?”
Exposing the Big Game 
Hunting is not a sport. It is by nature inhumane. Hunting is not “fair chase” in any circumstance, except when the game pulls a surprise attack and changes the equation of who is hunted. Man is using scoped powerful, far reaching rifles, ATV’s, high powered binoculars and other technology to get to and find and kill the game. The targeted “game” did not ask to play the “fair chase” game and there is not an equal chance of death on both sides of the game. Hunting with rifles or arrows is inherently cruel. Archers wound rather than immediately kill about half the time leaving the animal to suffer for hours, days, weeks or months. Trappers often leave their victims in traps for 48 hours or more then brutally kill them. One side views the other as recreational opportunities, the other side views the situation as an escape from horror, death and injury, or injury, pain and death. Subsistence hunting evolved into sports hunting and killers of wildlife are called sportsmen. We are long past subsistence hunting as a defensible argument. We rather rapidly turned away from that when humans turned to agriculture and animal farming and human population exploded and continues to do so. Animal farming (AKA ranching) is also unsustainable with 7 billion people going to 10-11 billion by end of the century. Wildlife is being hit hard on multiple sides: rancher, farmer, extraction industry, development encroachments and sports killing (AKA hunting), and wildlife agencies’ killing. So, hopefully, “if it does not feel right, don’t do it” spreads to more and more of the population. Sport killing, hunting, leads to a distortion of wildlife ecology with farming of target game species and a minimization and marginalization of predators and wildlife agencies’ killing and farming for hunters. It is animal slaughter in a horrendous scale with humans killing 27 million animals daily for food, and that is not counting the sea life and hunting. Half the world’s animals have disappeared in the last 40 years.
We need an ethic that values compassion, empathy, and good will towards all — including other species. I almost said “We need a NEW ethic,” but frankly our widespread persecution and exploitation of animals is absent of all ethics, to put it mildly.
Sorry, but in my opinion, there are no good excuses for hunting, including bow hunting. Maybe because of the increasing influence of animal rights groups, the hunters seem to be more determined and more in-your-face than ever. Facebook pictures of hunters grinning like gargoyles over their victims, descriptions of how they like to see wolves suffer, killing contests, etc. Until people can stand back and question the hunting culture and traditions, until they can experience empathy and imagine what an animal feels like in a trap or snare or filled full of bullets and arrows, and until they can stand up to family and friends who bully them into the killing, hunting will continue. The meanness and lack of concern of hunters for the suffering and death they cause makes this “sport” really ugly.
The hunters I have known are not very bright individuals. They lack college educations. I guess they make up for this by killing and thinking they are tough. My father was a hunter and an ugly Bubba. He had Field and Stream mag I remember. God he was disgusting -beer stomach and all.