Funny this subject comes up...
I was talking to my girlfriend the other day about hunting. I basically just asked her if she'd ever given any thought to learning how to hunt. We live in the city, but I have a friend who offered to teach me how to hunt and I plan on taking him up on it. It's something I think anyone who eats meat should learn how to do.
Anyways, when I asked her, I got a really quick "No."
I was actually kind of baffled, because she can shoot, she carries a gun, and she isn't one to kid herself about where her meals come from. We've watched hunting shows together, and occasionally it'll be a father teaching his young daughter how to hun. She loves to see those girls get their deer. She is, by no means, anti-
anything gun related. So when asked if she wanted to learn for herself, it shocked me a little that she said "No," without even thinking about it.
I pressed a little bit.
"Well, we eat meat, and you know where it comes from."
"True, but I just don't know about going hunting."
Hmmm... I need to be careful with this one, but I press on. "So what is it about the thought of hunting that you don't like?"
She thinks for a second... "Hmmm... I don't know."
So I give it another try. This time I try another angle - is she just squeamish? Let's see. "Well sweetie, not trying to be funny, but... if you don't think you could kill a deer, then how do you know you could kill a person if you needed to?"
She makes a certain face she makes when she's thinking about something really hard. I can tell she's doing some soul searching, and just when I think I might have won, she looks up and says,
"Well, if I ever had to shoot a person, it would be because he was trying to hurt me in some way... So hell yeah I'm going to shoot him. But with a deer, it's different. He's just trying to live his life - so I guess to be honest, I just view a deer as
innocent."
Damn! She hit me with a knockout punch!
I had to respect that. And to be honest, I can completely understand it. For me, it's food. Like I said, I've never been hunting as of yet, but what makes it alluring to me is getting in touch with something my ancestors had to do. It's about getting in touch with myself, and nature, and stepping away from cars and cell phones, computers, work, paychecks and everything life has become... and going out and hunting for my own food like men always have - long before life was full of gadgets and the meaningless duties most of us call "work". That's appealing to me on a lot of different levels. Shooting a deer, killing an animal... Those things, to me, have so little to do with why I want to hunt that it's really not even a factor.
For her, all she thinks of is that she'd be killing something innocent. And the killing aspect is what dominates her thinking about the entire subject.
Sorry for the story, but I had never really heard that before, and I thought I'd post it here. It was just funny to me that she had such a simple reason for feeling the way she does about it. But what blew me away was that none of her reasoning had anything to do with Bambi, or being an anti.