Seems to me that a lot of trouble has been caused by defining basic human urges as “bad”.  The way I see it, they are inherently neither “bad” nor “good”.  They are powerful, and can be expressed in constructive or destructive ways…but they are not inherently good or evil.

     But because they are powerful and potentially dangerous, some people have neurotic and irrational responses to that power.  Fear, denial, repression, avoidance, etc.  Others make rational, considered, and thoughtful decisions based on their unique physiological hard-wiring, life experience, and training.

      Let’s take the predatory urge.  As far as I know, most people have it somewhere.  For some it is strong, and for some it’s barely perceptible.  Some people are hunters, and some are more the gatherer type…but most of us eat meat.  For most of us, meat tastes good.  It provides essential nourishment.  Americans tend to eat prodigious amounts of it…because we can.  It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s clean and the gatherers can just pick it up from where it’s laying around in the meat department of your local grocery.

     They don’t have to see the stockyards and smell the blood and fear and hear the noise, and see the animals die.  It’s just like picking fruit or digging up roots.  Calm, clean, peaceful.  Hey, good for them.  They get all the benefits of predation without the muss and fuss.

     For some, that’s not good enough.  They make the decision to not be responsible for the deaths of animals…and/or are appalled by the slaughter and mistreatment of animals in the huge factory farms.  So they go vegan and animal-product free.  Once again, good for them.  They have assessed their values and made a moral choice for themselves, as is their God-given right as expressed by the constitution.

     Some people feel that, if you’re going to be responsible for the death of another creature, it’s preferable to kill it yourself.  So they hunt the animals, where the odds are a little more even (talk all you want about guns making it unfair…most of the time, the deer see/hear/smell the hunters before the hunters even know the deer are there…beyond that, shooting a deer on the run is not easy at all.  I don’t even attempt it.)  A good hunter takes comfort in the animal’s quality of life before they are killed for food, and does not risk causing undue suffering.  They also make a moral and ethical choice for themselves, and often do so seriously and with thoughtfulness and introspection.

     So, what has me talking about this?  A combination of the fact that my 12-year-old has begun firearms safety training in preparation for Rocky and I teaching him the ethics and values of a good hunter…and a couple people I’ve encountered who hate hunters and hunting.  Especially one particular person who will sit down and eat a steak without giving a spare thought to the fact that an animal had to die to get that meat to their plate…but feels comfortable condemning people for doing the job themselves…

     …and who attributes to hunters a sort of sick bloodlust…that hunters are sadists who enjoy killing for power, for pleasure, and for the sheer glee of causing suffering.

     Clearly, some people choose not to hunt because they take extreme displeasure in the idea of killing an animal.  But they make a mistake when they attribute their views and definitions to others, and assume that because someone chooses to hunt, they do so because they take pleasure in causing suffering and death in other creatures.

     If you watch hunting shows, you WILL see a bizarre sort of excitement as well as gloating and bragging…telling the tale of the stalking, set-up and kill repeatedly, and I’ve heard that referred to as proof that hunter like to see and cause suffering and death.

     If you don’t hunt, I can see how you might interpret it that way.  But I’ll try to explain it from the perspective of a hunter.

     Like Neal Stevenson says in his book, Cryptonomicon, We’re all stupendous bad-asses.  Every last one of us.  Every creature living on this planet is the genetic inheritor of millions of years of struggle for survival.  Part of what we inherited from out ancestors, to varying degrees, is the physical response to predation.

     When a hunter sits for hours, motionless, soundless and alert; their body goes into a close-to-basil state.  When they hear or see the deer or whatever they are hunting, they get a rush of endorphins.  This is the body’s way of preparing itself to spring into action.  The endorphins can cause a kind of euphoria- the heart pounds, the breathing quickens, the blood , delivering energy to the muscles.

     It’s a physical response commonly referred to as “buck fever”, and it actually gives the deer an advantage as it is meant to make you able to chase the deer down and kill it with your bare hands or rudimentary tools.

     But as humans are no longer suited for such endeavors, we have guns or bows – which require patience, focus and accuracy.  None of which are served by hair-trigger responses and muscles jumped up on the body’s own self-made happy-drugs.

     What you are seeing in people who appear to become excited by their kill is most often simply the left-overs of a physical response inherited from a long, long, line of genetic ancestors…and not a psychotic reaction to having killed.

     Further, there is the natural human tendency to believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well.  I am very proud of my hunting skill, and will tell stories that illustrate it.  Part of my pride in my skill is that I rarely cause more than a couple of minutes worth of pain in the animals I kill.  I am careful, and I believe that it takes more valuable to be smart about choosing where to wait for the animal, patient in waiting for a good shot, and graceful and silent in stalking for the best possible shot, than to be able to make long or risky shots successfully.  Only once has it taken me more than one shot to kill a deer.  Only twice has a deer run more than 20 feet from where I shot it, and almost every animal I’ve ever killed has died within seconds.

     I hunt because it is a personal moral value.  I prefer to get most of my meat myself, from an animal that has had a chance at a free and natural life.  I follow the rules that make me a helper in maintaining a natural balance that preserves the well-being of all wildlife and the environment.  I alone bear the responsibility for the life I take, and know that it is taken with respect and compassion.

     Others choose other ways to achieve these goals, and I respect that.  I understand that factory farming is part of the reason that we can feed the worlds population as well as we can.  I realize that people who only buy free-range animals do so out of concern for the animal’s quality-of-life.  I respect any decision that is arrived at thoughtfully and is shaped by the ethical values of the person who made the decision…I just wish that others could do the same.