Re: Something that will no doubt spark controversy....
 

I don't own a car (let alone a truck) at the mo.Nikki has claimed right on the only vehicle we have. Would i be classed as a Albertan eunuch?:ohmy:

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Too true :thumbup:

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You are making no sense at all.
What could possibly be more organic than wild game?

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Organically farmed animals are "reasonably well" cared for and as is sadly the case do not know about a better life outside of their corral or whatever you want to call it. The provide a better quality of meat to those who can afford it and in that class I would include those who can afford the guns, ammunition, big trucks, etc to go hunting. Farmed animals are an unfortunate necessity of modern life regardless of how they are farmed. I just wish more people could afford those that are farmed more humanely.

I'm sure that wild game tastes wonderful, but what gives anyone the right to go out and end the life of an animal when it is just not necessery.

Oh dear, I can feel my blood starting to boil. :)

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Why would your blood be boiling? you can't put your fingers in your ears and pretend its not happening.Animals are slaughterd every day,some of which ends up on your plate.

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Its a way of life for many of the First Nations people in this area. It doesnt have to be remote for this to apply. The people I work with, most of them say that they have some hunted meat in their freezer.

It's a more sustainable way of eating meat, better than mass produced farming.

Animals can't be described as innocent or guilty they don't really have a conscience.

I don't like the idiots I have met who talk about the great feeling you get when you get a kill, those who parade into Timmies with camo on their faces and oozing bravado. I have respect for those who hunt, kill, and then eat the animals.

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I never had any interest in hunting whilst in the UK. Now I am here and surrounded by it I have taken an interest in it. My OH bought me a crossbow for Xmas last year and I would love to go hunting with it.

However I want to hunt wild turkeys and we don't have any of those near here...lol

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Would you please post some pictures after 1st hunting trip.I can't wait.
Also we are thinking about farming some turkey's,if we do would you like to come over with the crossbow?

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Haven't you just described those that hunt - go crossbow some of them - it takes skill, guile and is good sport:p

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me too ...


I am a veggie!

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Sorry, but if you eat any form of "killed meat" you lose the argument you have just put forward. What is better: killing an animal that has been free all its life, or one that has been "harvested" for food?

Are the animals killed for supermarket food not innocent then?

As I said, I really can't see the point. Why can't those that wish to experience the skill use paintball - surely, hitting those that one is hunting, while they are trying to hunt you, has to be more skilful better than hitting something that cannot hit back:confused:

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lol you cheeky sod. My only downfall in this wish is that I am scared of turkeys...:blink:

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The moose, or the story??

It's much easier for most people to reload regular bows than crossbows though.

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No leather shoes, handbags, belts? veggie cheese? wine? beer? No fishscales used in your eyemake up and lipstick? No animal products used in your healthcare? No leather in the car? Nothing on that plane that got you here?

If so, well done I admire your resolve.

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Depends on the design really. Modern ones are easy enough. This is North America after all, everything is designed for minimum effort.

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Nahh not a vegan!! but do try to go for veggie winr. bear, lack of leather, , ,veggie makeup etc. . .sometimes its difficult and you have to go with the flow

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My personal opinion (feel free to disregard as I'm a veggie) - it's far more humane to shoot a moose which has had a happy few years mosying about, doing his thing until one day a hunter comes along and kills him. The hunter then takes him home and has meat in his freezer for his friends and family for a good long time.

A cow/chicken/pig brought into the world through artificial insemination, kept in rubbish conditions, fed artificial hormones, put in a truck with heaps of other animals, driven to a slaughter house and then killed. Pretty crappy life if you ask me.


On a lighter note, last year we had some workmen in getting the roof/siding done. One of them was just back from central newfoundland where he had been hunting for a week (he'd a licence for one moose in that area) and hadn't seen any moose at all for the entire week. As they were having a natter that morning, a moose walked up our drive and past them. PMSL.

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I didn't mention anything that was vegan there.

If you don't believe in eating animals then surely wearing a smear of haddock across the eyelids is even more unnecessary? Most of those other things aren't really hard to find. What do you do then to avoid this? Do you insist that your hosts cook veggie food for you ?? When do you decide that its ok to kill for a Tylenol but not for some protein?

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I completely agree with this. We should aim to give animals as natural a life as we can before killing them, factory hens are one extreme, wild moose another, we should feel more guilt about eating the hen than the moose.

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Tenuous link here but on the subject of fish and eyes, whenever I cut the head off a freshly caught trout, I can't look it in the eye. On the odd occasion I have done this, I get a mental picture (usually for the remainder of the day) of the thing staring at me, looking very unhappy about being decapitated.

No clue why I feel so guilty, they taste so good and it's feels so natural, being able to catch and cook lunch.

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Or the cheaper option.

As a society, most of us city-dwellers are brainwashed into believing that moose shouldn't be killed but that chicken and eggs are there solely for us to eat. Man was a hunter and gatherer long before we became polite society, though in those days he only ate what he killed or caught. Inuit communities stiil do for some months of the year.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have seen many obese cavemen, and I doubt many were vegetarians or vegans either.

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It's equivalent to Fox Hunting in the UK except that the critters are bigger !

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I use beauty without cruelty makeup and if I go to dinner at peeps houses I tell em I am veggie - most peeps I know - or did know in the uk knew I was veggie.

I dont disagree with the killing of an animal to feed a family etc but I dont think I could do it!

ps dont use Tylenol!

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I consider myself to be something of an animal lover, and would always opt for the more "ethical" meats than your standard supermarket option.
I've never been hunting- I once ran over a squirrel running over the motorway and I was gutted for the rest of the day. However, I'm finding myself strangely drawn to giving hunting a try.
I've no desire to kill an animal for the fun of it. However, I'd much rather kill something with my own hands (or rifle, preferably:p) and then eat it, knowing it's lived a natural life, than buy supermarket rubbish, knowing the animals have probably never even seen day light.

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Can't argue with that. But at least (or so I would hope) those who end the hen's life aren't having a jolly good time doing it. Getting any pleasure or satisfaction at all out of killing an animal yourself is just plain wrong. It's not as if it's an even contest so what has the hunter to be proud of?

Slightly off topic, you quite often see unfortunate road kill at the side of the road here in Alberta that has quite obviously had the head removed. Are there a group of pseudo hunters around who like to pretent that they hunt but don't actually? Or is it a bit like the "size of your truck" issue mentioned in an earlier post?

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Then I assume you missed all those Dispatches/Jamie Oliver documentaries about the conditions factory chickens are raised in? They showed live turkeys being kicked around like footballs.

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Can't stand watching Jamie Oliver, he makes my skin crawl and gives me the urge to vomit. But those kicking the turkeys should be taken out and treated the same way to remove them from the gene pool.

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This is lost on many who don't hunt unfortunately, oh well. The young man in this video shows some great patience and steadfast nerve.

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I can't say that beheading chickens is a jolly good time but there is satisfaction in having done it. I eat chickens so I ought to be able to kill one and pluck it.

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Hardly. The equivalent to fox hunting in the UK is fox hunting in Canada. We're going on a poker run with one of the local hunts on the weekend, I expect that'll lead to more hunt following this Autumn, the OH might actually hunt but I can see that I'll grow an adequate set over the coming weeks.

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I fail to appreciate his "nerve". He had a high powered rifle and the bear didn't know he was there. Had he been unarmed, I might agree with you.

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What not being said here is that the vast majority of the non native hunters in North America are in it for the Kill the meat is but a bonus

I don’t have any issues with eating meat wild or domesticated, the reality is we can’t sustain a wild population to feed the mouths we have so the domesticated animal is required for a population of its current size, the merits of either is just a novel smokescreen

Hunting with high tech weaponry be that a modern compound bow, high powered rifle with night vision using masking scents modern lures etc is hardly fair and hardy a difficult set of skills to master, in a lot of respects for many it is a legalized form of violence against animals to feed the needs of the inner bully

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Ooh, another hunting thread and I missed it yesterday. I'll be fashionably late to the party...

This is such complete tosh it's almost beyond funny and out the other side into serious again.

What do you mean by "our food production methods are no longer part of the natural food chain" - do you mean that seeing a slab of meat on the supermarket shelf is so divorced from the reality of the little baby lambs gambolling about in the fields that we don't need to think about it? I fear so, in which case it's just the kind of argument that promotes the ill-treatment of factory-farmed animals, the sort of "out of sight, out of mind" thinking that leads to feedlots stuffed to overflowing with hormone-pumped, antibiotic-laden corn-fed cattle who are so fundamentally unwell that they're only kept alive through all the drugs in their diet. OK, so I exaggerate a little, but not much.

Find a copy of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. He follows the industrial food production cycle from the cornfields of Iowa through the feedlots in Utah to the fast-food outlet. It's eye-opening (or at least was for me) in its illustration of the politico-agro-industrial mess that the US food industry has become (and that Canada echoes, though not to the same extreme extent).

I haven't hunted, but would love to. I have never yet eaten any animal I wouldn't be prepared to kill and butcher myself; I think it's important to be able to equate what's on your plate with the animal itself. The largest animal I've butchered is a sheep (I had help...) and in the UK I regularly picked up roadkill for the pot - mainly pheasants (not those I'd run over myself - that would be poaching) and rabbits.

On a semantic note, because that's what I do... there's a deep-rooted linguistic issue in English that goes some way to explaining the psychological gulf between the animals and their meat, largely traceable to the Norman Conquest. The Norman nobility used French words to describe the food which the English peasantry prepared for them - from animals with Anglo-Saxon names. This is why we eat beef from cows (and veal from calves); pork from swine; venison from deer; mutton from sheep. This linguistic issue has been put forward to explain why the Anglophone world is less connected to the sources of their food than peoples of other languages. Not sure I'd go that far, but it's certainly food for thought ;)

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That would be a question I would need to ask everyone that hunts. Many will have different reasons for doing it, none I would think are to manage the population. However that is the way that the population is kept to acceptable levels as dictated by the forestry commisions etc.

Its a means to an end and if the hunters are just in it for the kill, or the trophy then so be it. Its a win win.

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Would you encourage people to hunt horses? There are too many of them and they have to be culled, they're big targets but fast and so might be a challenge to bring down if the hunters were on horseback.

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Bollocks, you have completely missed my point. I am completely against factory farming which amongst other things is completely unnatural and therefore cannot be cannot be considered to have a place in the natural food chain. Sadly this is where 99% of the modern world gets it's food. I have no problem at all with how the less developed, for want of a better term, peoples of the world hunt to get their food. Killing anything other than through necessity is morally wrong.

And as for the video clip, I feel that is probably one of the most offensive things that has ever been posted on this site. I was almost willing to recind my comment about inbred Albertans posted part in jest on another post, but not any longer. The waste of sperm with a gun may very well not be Albertan but he epitomises the rednecks that we get around here. As someone else said, high powered rifle against a bear minding its own business. I can but hope that one day the gun jams and he gets what he deserves!!!

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Just out of interest, what is too many? Surely a point of balance will naturally be acheived, or do we have an imbalance because man has already wiped out large numbers of their natural predators?

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That would be more acceptable than the slaughterhouses and some of the "rescue" places that they end up in (as you well know ;))

Just because its an animal I love it doesbn't mean that I am all for keeping them alive and letting them run free at all costs. The world has moved on and sad as though it sounds there aren't many natural predators for horses these days (not in the numbers that stupid breeders are churning them out at).

Are there too many wild horses??? or are there too many domesticated (though granted unbroken) bred for the helluv it ones that end up in slaughterhouses sick and skinny beyond belief.

Do you think that turning these out to hunt would be cruel given their state of health, not to mention their familiarity to humans hence a "hunt" would probably entail goinjg up to them with some licquorish and putting a bullet in them.

Tough one - and one that would need to be looked into if it is indeed an over population of wild horses

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They don't have natural predators, they're not native to North America. There are now herds in the southwest much larger than the food source can support. The BLM tries to get people to adopt them but winds up having to cull.

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Oh, there certainly is, I wasn't thinking of using domestic horses for hunting. Have a look here:

http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/wil...and_burro.html