Originally posted by: C3PX
By "merely killing them for sport" I meant to say, hunting and not taking, or wasteful and reckless hunting habits. I met a guy once who bragged about shooting over 150 small game birds in a day. He proudly showed me a picture of himself proudly holding his shotgun surrounded by dead birds. If you shoot a few of them you can go home and pluck them and cook them fair enough, but he kept going merely because he was enjoying himself, and he went way too far. The majority of those birds ended up being thrown away, if any were used for food at all. They are a pain to pluck so it is not like you can call up your friends and say I got a few two many do you want some? Because very few people are willing to do all that work for such a tiny amount of meat. You have guys who will hunt deer, and when they make a kill they will just leave it. You are only allowed a certain number a deer every year, by abandoning them and pretending you didn't get anything allows you to get a better deer later and lets you kill more. These types of hunters are reckless. You have a lot of guys who do things like this and it makes hunters in general look bad. Both of these examples are illegal and if somebody doing either of them were to get caught he would have a hefty fine and possible jail time, but you would be surprised how many people get away with things like this. By "merely killing them for sport" this is what type of behavior I was referring too.
By "merely killing them for sport" I meant to say, hunting and not taking, or wasteful and reckless hunting habits. I met a guy once who bragged about shooting over 150 small game birds in a day. He proudly showed me a picture of himself proudly holding his shotgun surrounded by dead birds. If you shoot a few of them you can go home and pluck them and cook them fair enough, but he kept going merely because he was enjoying himself, and he went way too far. The majority of those birds ended up being thrown away, if any were used for food at all. They are a pain to pluck so it is not like you can call up your friends and say I got a few two many do you want some? Because very few people are willing to do all that work for such a tiny amount of meat. You have guys who will hunt deer, and when they make a kill they will just leave it. You are only allowed a certain number a deer every year, by abandoning them and pretending you didn't get anything allows you to get a better deer later and lets you kill more. These types of hunters are reckless. You have a lot of guys who do things like this and it makes hunters in general look bad. Both of these examples are illegal and if somebody doing either of them were to get caught he would have a hefty fine and possible jail time, but you would be surprised how many people get away with things like this. By "merely killing them for sport" this is what type of behavior I was referring too.
Yeah, I was already guessing that to be your belief and totally agree with your condemnation of the behavior you condemn. It's really sick to senselessly kill and waste animals like that. In addition, I don't like people that enjoy hurting animals at all. That's even more twisted.
And, Gaffer, I do understand your concerns about factory farms and hunting for sport. I personally don't like factory farms and try not to get meat that would have come from one, but at the same time, there are worse ways for animals to live their lives. I think of it as giving the animals a life they probably don't enjoy very much, but at the same time I can't really say they're purposely being mistreated (well, up until the slaughtering takes place of course). And in terms of hunting for sport, I meant that hunting for sport, with the intent of using the animal respectably and doing nothing cruel to it, can be perfectly fine to me on its own. I don't think the fact that the experience is a "game" makes it wrong or disrespectful by default. In fact, I believe the sport aspect can make harvesting an animal even more honorable since the animals are wild and often have a good chance to get away.