The honesty of the hunter

A few weeks ago, here in Victoria, a young man (21, I think) was badly injured by a ricocheting bullet whilst out deer hunting with his friends. The Herald Sun published a report of the incident on its website, the report was followed by many public comments of the ilk "Now he knows how the deer feels". Over the past 50 years we have seen the "Disney-fication" of animals, especially wild animals; talking foxes which don't tear apart every chicken they can find even when they're not hungry, estuarine crocodiles with nice smiles, cuddly rabbits which don't devastate the habitat of native mammals and plants, female elephants who are not, sometimes, given to killing their own newborn... I could go on.

What I find so hypocritical about the cuddly bunny approach is that the vast majority of people who espouse it are city-dwelling meat eaters most of who have no idea of the bush and its ways. Although I have been a firearms owner for 40 years I have never done much hunting (I shoot feral animals in the bush where necessary) - I don't enjoy killing and am a bit of a closet vegetarian - in spirit at least :) The following is a piece I wrote in response to the above Herald Sun article and its associated replies.

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There is an honesty to the hunter: he does his own killing unlike most of us who choose to pay Safeway to do it. But we want them to do it out of our sight and hearing and then package the result in a manner which removes it as far as possible from the concept of an animal who's death we have occasioned. The kilo of sausages you bought last week didn't commit suicide.

Man has hunted since the dawn of time, it is part of the cycle of life - he hunts wild animals which have lived the proper life of an animal, they played with their siblings, mated, felt the warmth of the sun on their skin - they have not been raised in a cage, filled full of drugs and screamed in terror as they smelled the blood and death of the path into the abattoir.

Before you become too sanctimonious take a visit to a factory farm and a tour of an abattoir and then tell me the way you "hunt" and kill your meat is morally superior to the way of the hunter.