In honor of my brother and father’s February birthdays coming up, I’ve decided to say a few things about deer hunting.
I know some people get all up in arms about hunting. If those people are vegetarian or vegan, then I get it. I get your point of view and I respect you for having it. Vegans draw a hard line which legitimizes their choice.
But some folks are trying to save the deer, yet they’re eating meat that they buy at the grocery store. I don’t know if you have seen the movie Food, Inc. But you really should watch it.
I didn’t make it to the end of Food, Inc. because, point taken. Painful reality of how our mass produced food systems work, at the expense of a good and healthy life for God’s precious creatures.
The conditions that our American farm animals endure before being led off to the slaughter, prettied up, antibioticed up and packaged off for sale are utterly deplorable. All you need is a few scenes to burn the truth into your mind forever.
Let me break it down for you:
Feedlot animal = chronic, stressed life for the animal.
Stress = sickness and malnutrition
We eat feedlot animal. We get sick.
And at the heart of this system is some sort of anti-life force at work. Seriously. Just watch the movie or part of it. You will become aware of why free-range, grass-fed is so vital to humans, animals and the health of our planet.
This brings me to being a deer hunter’s daughter.
I would take the nutritious meat of a wild deer that has been running free the way that goodness intended, any day over the tragic life of a feedlot animal.
So yes. I’m a hunter’s daughter. And my dad had good sense, solid practices, respect for the animal and respect for the sport.
I don’t know what people think of hunters, but it’s probably not your vision of some reckless, gun-toting lunatic lurking in the forest.
Hunting season comes each fall. For most of us, it’s just a blip in the radar. For people like my dad and brother, this is their time.
So every autumn like clockwork, for basically my entire life, my parents would have a fight because my dad would make plans to go upstate to a cabin in the poconos, OR up in New York state, away from crowded civilization, with his buddies.
For their sojourn down route 80 or up the New York Thruway, each guy would bring something delicious, some type of home cooked meal to share… a few bottles of wine, and of course they’d have their hunting gear and their shotguns.
The deer hunting ritual, as it was told to me:
My dad would spend hours sitting in a tree with his senses poised, waiting for movement… ears and fingers and toes growing numb from the cold.
To me, this sounds dreadfully boring. But it’s something that men have historically participated in… sharpening their eyes and ears for a clue that a delicious beast could be treading the nearby grounds.
Then you have the deer. Running free, living the life of a wild beast the way it was meant to be. Not trapped in a tiny, cramped stall, eating slop from a trough, making pitiful sounds and waiting for death before it even knows life.
No, the deer gets to live out its brief blissful existence– then, a single incident and it bleeds out and leaves this world.
We eat meat because our bodies need the nutrition. Protein, minerals, B12. When I was pregnant, I was told specifically to eat meat because vitamin B12 was critical for the formation of my baby’s nervous system, spinal column.
The basic tap root of a human takes shape via nourishment supplied by the meat of an animal. Think about that.
I eat a lot of plant-based meals. I’m not down on vegans. But I also have a great respect for the hunter, and people who voice their anti-hunter sentiments on social media don’t understand.
What’s the alternative to not permitting guns and hunting? Handing the need for population control of the local wildlife over to government officials to shoot up with birth control from a different type of gun?
(That’s what they do on the Chincoteague and Assateague islands where the ponies run wild, in case you didn’t know.)
So how does that make it better? They’re not letting the food chain’s natural order take care of things. Instead, they advocate something unnatural and unnecessary, not to mention inconvenient and expensive… and likely terrifying to the animals who live there.
All because of our own egotistical and greed-driven human compulsion to control literally everything on the planet.
This makes no sense. “Don’t eat those animals. Eat these instead. We will buy genetically engineered animal parts from China and you can have those. But don’t hunt. It’s wrong.”
Don’t eat wild animals. We’ll buy fish from Southeast Asia where they cultivate them on so-called farms where they are fed a diet of fecal waste and pesticides.
That seems much better than hunting for wild deer, doesn’t it.
But what about gun safety, you ask?
My dad was responsible with his guns. He kept them clean, he was tidy and organized with their storage. He didn’t brandish his weapons. He didn’t use them to intimidate, and I mean never.
My dad had important gun rituals and respect around hunting guns. He didn’t show off… though he had appreciation for a finely crafted shotgun or whatever he used.
Spending the days traversing the woods, sitting in trees in the freezing cold, then coming back to make a big meal, hang out, talk and laugh with his friends. That has been my dad’s hunter life since his days of being a young buck himself.
Dina Gio works as a freelance writer, web marketer and creator of WordPress blogs. Contact her via email for a project quote today.