Reply #38: OK, I'll answer

[OmahaBlueDog]

1. All of the edible members of the animal kingdom look cute or handsome to someone.

2. Cute or handsome as they may be, many animals are also often viewed as a nuisance (deer eating plants and crops) or a danger to livestock or people (coyotes, sometimes bears).

3. I have nothing against anyone who chooses not to eat meat or fish for moral reasons. However, in the same manner that I don't want to hear about the virtues of any particular religon by evangelicals, I also have no patience for those who want to impose their morality regarding meat, or animal products such as fur and leather.

4. I don't hunt. I know many who do. It is considered sport because, even under the best of circumstances, it is often not easy.

5. Hunting is as much about the bonding experience as anything. Getting up early. Positioning yourself in a deer stand in the morning twilight. Trying not to make noise. It is often an activity associated with family - fathers & sons; brothers; dads, uncles & cousins; friends. Stephen Ambrose writes about hunting with his dad and members of his unit from WW II.

- Can you do the same things with a camera as a gun? Except for the eating part afterward, sure.

6. Like many aspects of life and society, a small minority are what causes any group to get a bad name. That's true with hunters, priests, anti-war protesters, little league coaches, boy scout leaders, college basketball coaches, and those who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008. Most hunters are not vile spewing gun nuts. Most hunters I know are angered by laws that impact them negatively, in spite of the fact that they've been continually responsible with their firearms, and have never broken any laws with respect to their weapons.

7. If you don't like what goes on in hunting, I doubt you'd fare well in a slaughter facility either. I have been to slaughter facilities, and viewed the spectacle from the pens, through the kill box, to the "harvesting", through the chiller, then to the fabrication area, and on to where the boxed meat leaves for stores and restaurants, and combo bins of trimmings and organs leave for pet food plants, lunch met plants, export, or rendering. It's an efficient, if ugly, process. Most of the people I've met in that business are decent business people with no desire to see animals suffer unnecessarily. They spare those of us who eat meat from the arduous and time consuming process of having to hunt for all of the meat that we eat, and ensure that it is readily available at reasonable prices.

- If you feel eating meat is wrong, then discussing any of this is eactly like discussing the legality of abortion -- an unwinnable argument that ultimately hinges on one's view of morality.

OK - rant over