Zack,
I'm a hunter, and come from a long hunting culture. I was in a rural Vermont congregation, and there were several hunters in it. Venison was a staple of my boyhood diet, for sure.
Jaguarbass;
I've usually liked your posts, and as a similar-aged musician myself, I love your posting name. But, I've got to disagree with you on this one. As a lifelong Vermonter, you sound to me like the typical move-in flatlander up here who has no hunting experience, and really no experience at all in actually putting meat on their table apart from buying it at the supermarket, but who spouts off about being anti-hunting and all sorts of things in the rural life amidst a working environment that they know nothing about. These are the same people who see all logging as bad, who moved to Vermont because of its incredible pastoral landscape, and then complain in the spring when the farmers fertilize the fields because they can't stand the smell of cowshit!
Your comments are typical of those who see "nature" as "out there," and humans as "over here," seperate from the natural world. Guess what? Humans are part of nature too. We're the reigning omnivore on the planet, and we're a physical and mental match for any other hunter in the animal kingdom, of which we happen to be a part. Your comment on your belief in karma was a joke. You might not have noticed, but the entire natural world is filled with killers - is it bad karma for the wolf to kill the deer, the lion the antelope, the spider the fly? Are they going to be punished for that by some invisible lawmaker, some mythical karmic force? Get with it, man - we're all a part of that great cycle of life, which is based on a hell of a lot of killing, from the microbrial level on up. Even if you're a vegetarian, the only way you're going to survive is to kill a hell of a lot fungi and insects who want those veggies for themselves! I'm sure you're not the sort of hypocrite that sees some kinds of killing (insects, rodents, fish) as okay and other kinds of killing (the cute animals) as wrong.
Guess what - meat doesn't grow pre-packaged. Somebody is doing all the dirty work for you - your killing and butchering. That, to me, is really serious bad karma - having other folks do your shit work for you. Most people in first world countries are completely disassociated from where their meat, vegetables and fruits come from. Few of us can or have the desire to provide all of our necessities in a personal way - but the end result is that it leaves most people incredibly ignorant about what is involved in putting a meal on the table.
I grew up in a house with guns in a very rural area where hunting was a part of the life. Also huge vegetable gardens, chickens and ducks in the chicken house and beef raised in the fields around the house. Chopping the heads off a hundred chickens early every fall, then plucking and cleaning them, or putting a .22 bullet into the brain of the beef we raised and then hauling it up with block and tackle and butchering hundreds of pounds of beef, was not anything I ever looked forward to. But it was nice to enter winter with a freezer full of chicken, beef and venison, and I sure as hell enjoyed eating it.
Hunters love killing, eh?? What an asshole statement, an arrogant sentiment that could only come from someone who's never hunted or killed anything. Killing and butchering are bloody rough endeavors, and not for the fainthearted or queasy-stomached, but they are a necessity if you're a meat eater, and there are some of us who are still willing and able to do it for ourselves. And guess what? We've got a million years of evolution behind us of killing and butchering our food.
Being in the wild, hunting, stalking, tracking, seeing game - all of these things are enjoyable. They reconnect you with 100,000 generations of our ancestors. The killing - the only pleasure there is the pride in doing it well - swift and clean and accurately. And wild animals, compared to how domestic animals are raised for meat, have an incredibly great life, roaming free and as they will, unless they're ravaged by disease due to over-population. The meat is better than just about anything you can buy - the best of natural feeds and no hormones and injections.
My rant is done, except for one last point. Be careful about insulting the intelligence of posters who might be hunters when your own posts are filled with misspellings! I can connect you with the writings of some pretty intelligent hunters, if you'd like, starting with Jim Harrison, Paul Shephard and Rick Bass.
S4