I’d be happy to let you borrow it, but shipping may turn out to be the price of the book

Drop me an e-mail if you are interested.

Hunters in the US contribute more money to the environment than any other group. Money aside, without hunting the population of deer and other species keep on growing. Overpopulation means the animals health deteriorates significantly, economic damage occurs as they move into farming or urban areas. Eventually they would need to be culled to keep the population in checked.

Unlike farming, which is incredibly bad for the environment, deer, boar, duck, etc are organic. I don’t know what organic meat sells for, but I imagine a lot more.

Hunters paying incredibly huge fees fund the conservation of endangered animals. Some Mexican wild goat (can’t remember the name) is doing a lot better since they offered limited hunting for an exorbitant fee. Same goes for private game reserves in Africa where elephant and lion breeding is funded by fees.

While hunters may spent a lot of money on the latest gear, it is no different to the tactical crowd, competition shooters etc. . A guy with a cheap 50 year old SKS, a single round of 7.62×39 and one weekend can fill the freezer for a year with high quality organic meat. My primary hunting rifle is 30 years old (new optics).

As far as doing sport what some people call work. IPSC, IDPA, target shooting, plinking etc. are all martial arts. For the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is work. But that does not mean the sports are not enjoyable back home. The same goes for boxing, marathon running, javelin throwing, fencing etc. Those sports were work for our ancestors.

And the whole “Eating meat from the store is immoral” non-sense is something that was cooked up by the Enviro-Socialists. The fact is that the meat at the store will stay there until it rots, in which case the animal’s death is more than meaningless or until demand completely evaporates, which will never happen because humans eat meat. You kill a cow in a slaughter house, it goes into products that can feed HUNDREDS of people. You kill a deer in the field, you can make Venison steak and jerky to feed your household and provides snacks for a few buddies. Hunting for food (and I mean real hunting, on foot, overland, tracking through hill and dell, and so forth, not that waiting-in-a-treestand bullshit that I originally mocked) is perfectly legitimate, albeit inefficient.

“But it’s not fair to the animals! They never had a chance to live!” So? They’ve got no chance of out running a .300 Win. Mag in the hands of a decent shot. It’s not fair to eat an egg out of a bird’s nest when the bird isn’t even around, but that’s how our earliest ancestors acquired their protein. There’s no way that a 180 grain bullet into the heart and lungs is faster or less painful than a compressed air bolt-gun to the head.

To me, it makes sense to spend the money I would spend hunting on food, like meat. For the privilege of doing what my ancestors considered work not sport, seems ridiculous. I wonder if future generations, hundreds of years from now, will use indoor arenas to grow grass and then pay for equipment and licenses for the privilege of mowing the lawn like their ancestors did before them.

Steve, thanks for thinking enough of me to quote my PeTA, Cowards One and All article. The whole hunter ethics and hunter’s rights responses are still a work in progress. It’s definitely topic that still needs discussion and exposure.

Best regards,
Albert
Instincts and Hunting

But Strauss is saying “I actually wanted an excuse to shoot a bad guy.” He’s talking about shooting a person. Having read a bit of his book The Game, I’m pretty sure he often exaggerates for shock effect—just in little ways, but his writing style began to annoy me that way. Or, maybe he is a sociopath.

Something similar happened to me. I bought a shotgun and all of the sudden I wanted to shoot lawyers in the face… Bloodlust = Psychopath

Back on topic, I watched Discovery Channels “Out Of The Wild” and I thought that was probably one of the best representations of hunting I had seen in a show designed for a mass audience. It was great to see the joy in the characters/players when they made a kill, not because of the killing but because it was valuable protein.

I for one believe meat harvested from the wild is much more ethical than meat produced by warehousing an animal for all its life. Organically grown meat, you could say. (The quality is much better too, not destroyed by stress hormones from hours or even days of transport in crowded conditions to a slaughterhouse, nor pumped full of antibiotics.)

the blood lust quote (as clearly stated above) is in regards to shooting people NOT animals. as strauss says “I actually wanted an excuse to shoot a BAD GUY.” (emphasis mine) c’mon guys lets not eat up everything the liberal media throws out there!

if hunting isn’t your thing, that’s totally fine. i just want people to realize where their lunch came from; a living breathing animal that tastes really good

Hunting was and is something you have to learn, there is nothing wrong with sitting and waiting in an open place on high and waiting for one to randomly come, and there is nothing wrong with tracking it after it is injured (note, you don’t go running into private property or into wildlife preserves).

I went hunting with my Grandpa when I was around 10, and I think he has hunted in every continent. Being so young at the time, what we mostly did was plinking (nice gold engraved 8 shot .22 revolver was my piece for the day), and chasing rabbits when we saw them.

Like I said, he has hunted in every continent, and his den is filled with stuffed animals and skulls from every sort of gazelle like creature, from tons of different places. (Some collect stamps, he collects kills) He even took a couple shots at a Coyote that was eying a mans property (not in the fence line though). Now, there is a temporary thrill seeing somethings life leave it accompanied by the sound of that big revolver he had (Thinking back now I believe it was a .357 Magnum, but I am not sure), but that thrill died quickly, and never was there for the one that did not die on the first shot.

It took a number of shots, and was still alive when we got to it (they were pretty long shots). But the other one could give pleasure, a clean kill that gave it no pain. (How do I know? Well, he got it in the neck… the thing jerked 5 feet in the air in a back flip)

Sorry for any rambling, but bottom line, blood lust is bull crap.

I am not opposed to hunting as long as the prey is used for food, but I do not hunt because I live in a society where food is presently plentiful, although that may change in the not too distant future. But I think hunting for sport is base and barbarous. Waiting in a tree stand for hours in a baited field with scent blockers covering your every aspect of existence when all that you possess camouflaged beyond recognition and then using a high powered rifle and scope to shoot an animal from 50 feet is not hunting, it’s waiting. It is no more sporting than going to the store and buying a steak.