Is Hunting Cruel and Wrong?
- RED TOOTH OUTDOORS
- Jan 19, 2019
- 3 min read
Growing up in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, hockey, football, and going to the arcade is what we did. Hunting animals was never a thought. No one I knew in my family hunted. We fished, and did a lot of fishing especially on our family camping trips or the treks up to a family friend's cottage in Halliburton on Lake Koshlong. Don't remember seeing deer but there were always bear run ins. Like the time we were camping,
and in the middle of the night we hear noises in the campsite. My Dad looks out of the tent and says to us, "well it either is a bear or two men with very hairy legs". Fun family times. But the thought of hunting....nope! Closest we ever got to shooting something was with a camera!
For someone like Shane in the beginning it was just a way of life, a means to put food on the table. As he got older and moved to the city he went through the motions of not hunting but is now back into it, and letting me tag along. He is teaching me many things. But thats his story to tell. I didn't get into hunting until Shane, Merv and myself took our Firearms and Hunters course one weekend a few years back. I aced it by the way. You will have to ask the other two what they got!! Having the instruction behind me I still didn't know if I was really into it. In that transition to hunter I started to read, listen to podcasts, watch videos on hunting, and everything involved with it. Including the opposition to hunters and fishermen. Here is my take on all this.
No it is not cruel or wrong to harvest your own meat.
It would be simple to leave it at that but anyone that has seen my personal Facebook know I am not shy of stating my opinion especially controversial ones.
So here is why I think it is not.
It is fact that any animal I harvest out in nature has lived a better life than any one that has been factory farmed. That animal also most likely had a better end than if it perished in nature from starvation, disease, traffic accident or being eaten alive by a predator.
Nature is cruel.
We live in a world where "Alexis" controls our heat, lights and the music we listen to simply by talking to it. A world where humans strive to do things easier and make things more convenient. Its not hard to see why how the meat got to our dinner plate is easily lost in ones mind.
Now it might be seen that it is all good and righteous eating a vegetarian or vegan diet (I really enjoy their food as it is incredibly tasty) but the hard unspoken truth are farms where soy beans, and other foods are grown are protected by farmers from destruction by varmints. Squirrels, moles, shrews, rabbits or anything that get in the fields are killed when the fields are ploughed. Mind you there is the argument that it results in considerably less deaths of animals.
And now there is strong evidence that it is affecting the environment through deforestation. Soy farming has been a driver of Amazon deforestation. More than one million square kilometres of land are now dedicated to growing soy. Most of it comes from South America, where the intensive production of soybean is fuelling deforestation in the Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest forest.
Hmm seems like nothing is perfect out there. What I have always said when people tell me that doing this is bad and eating or drinking that is bad for you is........ moderation.
Moderation is the key. And if you don't like something by all means don't do it, if someone else likes doing it all the power to them. As long as moderation is practised, no harm no foul I say.
Doug Taylor
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