I'm the kind of person who, because of his fascination with cooking and learning to make new meals, I get hands-on with a lot of meat, ANY chance I can get. BUT... I cannot go to a slaughter house. I CANNOT watch how chickens are put down. I'm fine with working with selective parts of the animal once it's been turned into ingredients for food, but I can't handle watching a life be snuffed out. It was hard enough being in the same room as relatives while they passed... several times. But I couldn't even handle the knowledge that my childhood dog had been taken to the animal hospital and put to sleep when I was about 11 years old. I just don't want to see the process of killing an animal. I know it must be done, if you're to get the food. I just can't handle watching it happen.
But I can KINDA understand the motivations behind SOME hunters. You're not "shooting fish in a barrel", to use an oft-overused if somehow appropriate under this context phrase. That is, you're not going to some kind of place where you are totally protected and where the creature is completely subject to your whims of how you will dispatch it. You are leaving the confines of civilized society, going up against a dangerous animal that MAY both be capable of and willing to kill you (yes, most likely because you invaded its territory, so you instigated their self-preservation instincts) and you managed to triumph against it, somehow. It's overcoming a primordial experience, and I'm sure that grants an adrenaline rush. But just because I feel like I can understand it doesn't mean I condone or am interested in it. I understand why people bungee jump, skydive, glide, and so on. But I don't any the slightest interest in the activity, myself. Ditto with hunting.
Of course, that doesn't mean EVERY hunter is the same way. Some guy being taken to a place where a protected animal is kept safe from poachers and basically being treated to an easy kill, then taking the trophies because he PAID for the service? That's... that's just frivolous and silly. He didn't EARN the trophies, he just paid for their acquisition. It's not the same thing. Say what you will about hunters, but most of them who have taxidermy animals and mounted heads EARNED them, themselves. You don't have to like it, I don't like it, but at least their acquisition was legitimately through their own effort and skill. But people who take these thing simply because they had the money? Their "ownership" of those trophies is just false advertising, in this context.
I REALLY don't get the mindset behind those types who say they do it cause they like being able to kill. That sounds weird... borderline sociopathic. But at least they don't represent the majority of hunters.
Personally, I understand the sport of hunting bears MORE than the sport of hunting deers. Bears can kill you. Deers can just jump in front of your car and get run over by you, maybe killing you inadvertently. I do understand the PROCESS of hunting deers because they're pests, but I wouldn't consider that very sporting.
