Seems like every year, about this time, I’ll start to see more activity regarding my old posts about pro-hunting vs. anti-hunting.   I’ll get comments on old threads as well as emails directly to my box.  I attribute some of it to the fact that public school kids are getting their research paper assignments for the last half of the year.  In fact, I often get requests to quote my essays or old posts in research papers (I always accede, and ask for the opportunity to read the finished product). 

But some of the flat-out attacks, moronic threats, and other stuff… well, maybe it’s from the same source.  I don’t know.  A lot of it certainly is puerile enough to have come from school kids.  The language and lack of substance remind me of a bunch of nine year-olds cussing at one another behind the cafeteria during recess.  Flexing the lexicon, so to speak, and often taking great linguistic liberties.  

Anyway, I always delete the personal attacks and extreme foul language, but sometimes I get one that, while not necessarily well-reasoned, seems to be reasonably toned.  Like this one from Steven F (I’ll keep his last name to myself):

Hmm.  In your piece titled “Fighting the Anti-Hunters” you admit that you and most hunters do not hunt for subsistence but because you/they enjoy doing it…not that there’s ever been any doubt about that.  But let me get this right.  You are saying you shoot animals because you feel like it, because it gives you pleasure.  How on any moral grounds can you justify that — killing an innocent being for pleasure, aka enjoyment, sport, fun, or whatever you call it, and not know there’s something very wrong and selfish about it?  What is ethical or moral or justifiable about killing if you don’t really need to?  I’d like to know.  

The essay he’s referencing here, Fighting the Anti-Hunters, was published on my personal website back in 2001. 

Sometimes, I really wish someone would come up with something new to debate, by the way.  I expect anyone who’s read this blog for more than a year has seen some version of this same argument repeated here and on other sites where I comment.  I’ve made the same responses so often that I can do it by rote, if I’m careful.  Sometimes I probably do.  In fact, because of the redundancy I hesitated sharing it at all… but then I realized that I was short of content this week. 

So there’s the challenge.  What do you guys think?  I wrote a response, of course, that I hope wasn’t too lengthy.  I’ll share that tomorrow because I’d like to read what some of you might have to say first.

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