[Sam Cree]

No claims for rationality.

I love walking accross fields, and through woods in the cold, under the starry sky with my rifle, black powder or centerfire. I love the scouting before the hunt. And I even love the sitting still in the freezing cold for hours, waiting for a shot. And I find the heart pounding intense awareness of the actual kill of a deer indescribable. The whole thing fulfills something within me on a very primitive and real level. I find a certain spirituality in it all. I realize that I am finding spirituality in the actual act of killing. However, I believe that is because, at a level not very much deeper than the veneer of "civilization," man is a predator. That's why I think many hunt because of who they are, not to prove they are something else.

My happiness and and excitement when I am successful does not prevent me from also feeling regret and sadness.

Yet I am not a vegetarian, so, to me, who both causes and witnesses the death of the animal which I will eat, I am surely as deserving of eating it as is the person who buys meat already packaged at a market.

[warchild9]

There are three kinds of hunters:

1. "Cultural" hunters, like I once was, who grow up in a culture where it's normal.

2. "Spiritual" hunters, like yourself, who consider it part of the natural. I don't speak of you, particularly, but I get arguments like "Hunting makes me one with nature." I answer that attitude puts humans on the same level as animals, who have no choice but are part of a system which requires them to kill, and we've grown beyond that level.

3. And there are subsistence hunters, who have been discussed.

4. Oh, and there's sadists. We don't need to talk about them.