When I first gave up meat, I used to think hunting was better because of the whole "free range" scam. But now I can't get past what drives the kind of person who feels like they have to take the life of another living soul.
There are a few avid hunters where I work and I like them, for the most part. They seem like nice caring men. But sometimes I think about the part of them that makes them kill and it creeps me out. We're not talking about an age where it's necessary to hunt to survive, anymore. I don't get the whole "thrill of the kill" mentality. It scares me.
I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet...hope I didn't veer too far off on the topic.
I don't get it either. My family didn't hunt, but we did fish; I gave it up in my teens (when I started keeping an aquarium and
finally acquired some empathy for fishes, logically enough). Dad was an avid collector of sporting magazines (Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sports Afield) and I sometimes read them, but nothing really made sense, even though (I'm sorry to say now) I did feel excitement when I caught a fish. Thinking back... I felt the same excitement when, years later, I went through a video game phase.
My best guess is that to hunt, someone must be unable to have any real feeling for the animal they hunt: to realize that an animal's life has value to the animal living it, whether or not the animal can actually *fear "death". Hunters will sometimes deny this up and down- I've heard them and read what they've written. But I've never once seen them explain their position coherently, although I believe they can care about pets they have, and certainly about human beings.
*Clueless Git (in my opinion, you're far from "clueless" or a "git", by the way, even though I know your chosen title is tongue-in-cheek): We recently posted about whether or not animals in a slaughterhouse fear death. I know they feel absolute terror, at least sometimes, but I honestly don't know if they can truly imagine their own future nonexistence, any more than a very young child understands "death". I believe they have evolved to instinctively fear things which often indicate they are being attacked or are in danger: sudden loud noises, certain odors such as the smell of a predator, large violently-moving approaching creatures. Not that it matters much, really; as I argued above, taking an animal's life does that creature real harm by depriving them of existence, even if it is done painlessly and without causing the animal fear. But humans have a long history of under-rating animals, and maybe I'm doing that right now.
