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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 ;)

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

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.

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

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.