The topic of hunting is one that I hold a lot of emotions and deep grounded beliefs against. Yes, I’m one of those flaky people, you might say, who believes that all organisms are equal. We are at the top of the food chain, but how many good things come out of people taking advantage of their hierarchical power?Why do we hunt in this day and age? Some explanations that I’ve come across are that we have deep routed instincts to hunt and have a violent nature. Look at the medieval times, look at the time of the gladiators, that was their television! And now we have wrestling. Do we have to hunt to survive, like our ancestors did? No, not at all, we have supermarkets, grocery stores, meat markets; I don’t think there’s an absence of an abundance of meat. Of course I’ve had the “pleasure” of people disagreeing with me on this aspect. As one specific editor might say, he likes the chase and the taste of wild animals. OK, the chase, there’s that homicidal instinct coming out, and the wild animal bit, you can pretty much buy any animal at a meat market. So what’s the big deal?I never grew up with hunting with dead animal heads hanging on my wall, so maybe I’m missing out on the “true” feeling of hunting. Maybe there’s some underlying meaning that I’m missing out on. The thing is, I just can’t help but feel sorry for anything that’s suffering, I would say an animal dying is suffering. You know how you always say, “I’ll never be like my parents,” then you wake up one day and realize that’s exactly who you are. Well my mother is an environmentalist, and everyday she’d drive me crazy with “recycle this, animals that, don’t buy this.” Now, I’m the one preaching about recycling and caring about the living things around me.I’m not so against deer hunting anymore (but, I would never do it and I don’t promote it) because I realize that there is an overload of deer and having too many deer could screw up the “circle of life,” so to speak. However, hunting animals that are barely in existence bothers me greatly. It’s estimated that every four minutes a species becomes extinct. I know I might overdo it with feeling empathetic towards animals, but if I look into the face of an animal that is scared or hurt, I just can’t help but feel completely and utterly sorry for them. It’s true we are more powerful and higher on the food chain than them, but does that mean we’re supposed to take advantage of that power? Maybe an example that we can all relate to would help with this picture. When you were small and your big brother or sister decided, “let’s play bean bag with little bro or sis,” were you not petrified when your brother or sister was standing over you with all their power? That’s how I imagine every animal in the world feels around hunting time.I know the topic of hunting is a “sticky” one, but I just hope that everyone who hunts is at least doing it for the food and not for the sheer excitement of killing something of less power than them. That’s all it really is, bullying someone who’s smaller than you.
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