Am I being hypocritical?

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I love hunting. The whole experience is something that brings me joy and excitement. I'm not a trophy hunter. I eat everything I kill. I feel horrible when I make a bad shot and just wound an animal.

On the other hand, I cannot stand seeing animal cruelty. Sometimes I feel more empathy towards animals than humans. I saw a video earlier where a soccer player kicked an injured owl, and I wanted to beat the s**t out of that guy!

Last edited by jetbuilder on 26 Aug 2012, 11:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

*hypocritical*

Even thinking strictly black-and-white, it's a matter of who is treating the animal with compassion. The soccer player obviously was not concerned about feeding himself. You OTOH sound like someone I would want to think of when I heard the name PETA (never mind the throwing red paint on people wearing fur coats; that just means 1 more mink or fox is going to have to die to replace the ruined coat)

What's more hypocritical to me is condemning people for eating meat while wearing Birkenstocks and playing Hacky Sack

I'm horrible at spelling

Hunting is actually good for the environment. With the decline of natural predators, many species such as deer are at risk for overpopulation. I don't think it's hypocritical at all. I love animals and I don't stand for animal cruelty, but I eat meat and I'm fine with hunting and fishing, like you are. I don't think this is contradictory. I'm not an environmentalist, but I am a conservationist. This to me is the most logical approach.

You're not being hypocritical. My younger brother used to be a hunter like you, but at the same time, he's always had compassion towards animals. As a child he would cry if you even talked about mistreating an animal around him.

Ironically, I can't spell worth anything on my own(thank you red lines!) but I can spot other's errors like it's a superpower. To answer your question, the fact you have emotions about hunting doesn't make you a hypocrite, it makes you human. I can't knowingly harm anything more biologically complex than a bug myself, but I am an omnivore. That meat has to come from somewhere. You're just closer to the source than I am.

Yes.

I don't think so. Same thing happens naturally in the wild, sometimes the prey will escape from the predator after a run in and they prey ends up suffering for awhile. It happens sadly, only thing you can do is keep practicing your shot, to make sure those bad shots are not made as much. Depending on where you are hunting, and where you shot you're possibly lending a hand to prey/scavengers, so maybe that's a positive.

No. Taking an animal to eat is not the same as torturing it for pleasure. The fact that you may enjoy the hunt does not make you cruel, so long as you try to end it's life as quickly as possible in order to not prolong it's suffering. You have to remember that the idea that hunting is cruel is a relatively recent construct that exists mostly in developed countries where people have lost their connection with where their food comes from. In many places this would not even enter into the minds of the people as, without a successful hunt, they would starve to death. I see no difference in, say, taking a deer and going to the meat department at your local store and buying pre-packaged meat. In the end, you are still responsible for the animal's death. It's just that buying it from the store disconnects you from the process and places the store, farmer and meat packer in the process as your proxy.

I think I am too, but for a different reason. I get dissappointed when people I want to see online on another site dont show up at the time they usually show up, and yet sometimes I can't show up because my life gets in the way, so I think it's only right for them to be dissappointed and for me to say sorry when I come back.

I don't really understand the point of the question. Do you really give a stuff what other people think about what you do, and if they did think you was a hypocrite.

I wouldn't say you're a hypocrite no. Since you actually eat what you hunt rather than just killing animals for kicks. When someone buys meat in a supermarket, it has to come from somewhere. It just so happens you get it straight from the source.

You're not being hypocritical at all. If you like hunting, you should be doing it.

You eat what you kill so no that's not being hypocritical. Actually, even being a trophy hunter wouldn't be hypocritical because you would mount and display them. You would be hunting them for a reason and not just shooting them to watch them in pain. Even things like the squirrell hunt that they had around here last winter wouldn't qualify as animal cruelty because the squirells were nuisance animals and they were being hunted to humanely get rid of them rather than poison them.

I'm a vegetarian and I don't have a problem with what you're doing. I choose not to eat animals because I found I am equally happy or happier without eating them - I get all sorts of gastric symptoms and they have been less since I stopped eating meat. I'm not on some moral crusade.

So, if you're not hunting exclusively for pleasure, you are making it as humane as possible ** and you are planning on making as good use of the animal as you can then I am fine with what you're doing. I find trophy hunting to be abhorrent. I think that people who derive pleasure solely from killing stuff with no actual point to it have something badly wrong with them.

** i.e. get it disabled with your weapons fire and then finish it with whatever method is usual (throat slitting?) as soon as it is safe to do so.