Hunting

[kerryg]

So my view on hunting is..........if you are going to eat it then fine but if you are doing it for the sake of shooting something then you need to find another hobby

I agree with this. Growing up in the rural Midwest, I've known lots of responsible hunters who ate what they killed and did their best to follow regulations and improve habitat for game on their properties, which improves habitat for many other wild creatures too. On the other hand, I've also known my share of hunters who hunt for the "thrill of the kill," trash the woods with beer cans and ruts from their ATVs, and generally are just sick, horrible human beings. I support the former, and respect the fact that they have the guts to look their dinner in the eye before eating it. The latter I wish would vanish from the face of the earth.

Even though I support hunting for food, I do believe that hunting is greatly overrated as a form of population control. On the one hand, without hunters many US states would be completely overrun with deer, but the main reason deer populations got so high in the first place is because hunters killed off all their natural predators. In areas where predators such as wolves survive or have been reintroduced, many hunters are absolutely up in arms and lobby constantly for the right to shoot them on sight, despite the incalculable environmental benefits of having top predators around. Even in states where top predators have been totally exterminated, many hunters lobby state wildlife management organizations to keep deer populations artificially high, despite the cost to the environment and even the long-term health of the deer herds themselves. This sort of selfishness and disregard for the environment is very frustrating and imho gives all hunters a bad name. I wish the hunting community would do a better job of combating it.