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You guys will be speaking different languages. You probably grew up hunting, and know the instinctual responses which occur during the hunt and as you sit on the trigger, waiting for the sight picture to be just perfect. And you accept it as part of being a being that needs meat to live, so hunting is natural to you. I understand that, and would actually consider myself a hunter, though I only kill predators. I have those instincts too.

At the same time, I kind of get his take. I befriended the deer around my house when they were starving in the winter, and see a lot of humanness in them. I have actually had a few females, after I gave them food stop in the middle of eating, and go to timidly kiss my face, some deer mix of appreciation and fondness, after they got to know me. I see their love for their babies, even after they grow up and hang in the same herd as adults, and being kind of a loner, and a target of US domestic surveillance now myself, I can see myself as the animal minding my business and leaving others alone, when some dude I do not know decides he is going to screw up my day because he enjoys doing that.

I think a lot of non-hunters are looking strictly at the act of taking a life which is not a threat to them, for personal enjoyment, and they feel the animals are kind of deserving of some empathy. I know hunters mmake healthy ecosystems, but they are not seeing that, and moreover, they think the only reason the hunter does it is enjoyment of taking the animal’s life.

I know, growing up as a hunter, that is like as foreign a take as you can imagine, but if you never hunted, all it seems like is killing something not bothering anyone for no real reason. They don’t see overpopulation, or how things die in the wild, vs a clean shot, or where the money goes and what it does, or any bigger picture. The animal could have gone on, and someone killed it for no reason. And they kind of feel like it is like killing a human.

Even knowing about overpopulation, and starvation, and disease, and how animals die in the winter, and thinking hunting is overall less painful for the population, (and even knowing I would prefer a bullet to dying naturally in the woods) I could still not just kill one of the girls I know.

Now coyotes, Bobcats, and anything else which poses a threat to something else, or attacks others as a rule, that I can love, and probably it would be where to start with non-hunters. Once something puts itself in the food chain, and kills or harms something else itself, it releases you to enjoy those instincts, and can’t really complain about getting hunted itself.

But anyone who grew up hunting, is going to have a hard time explaining hunting grasseaters to someone who didn’t.