Okay, I swore to myself I wasn’t going to comment on the whole Cecil the Lion thing, but… I think we all knew that wasn’t going to happen, so, here goes…
First, let me say I have no problem with hunting in general. Life feeds on life. That is literally a fact of life. To live, something must die, even it it’s a plant. And since I have no intention of becoming a vegetarian, that means animals.
That said, I do believe we have a sacred responsibility to treat animals humanely while they are alive, and kill them humanely when we are ready to eat them. This means, if we are going to kill an animal, either as the butcher or the hunter, we do it quickly and cleanly, with as little pain and fear as possible.
If you’re wondering, no, I don’t hunt myself. Not for any moral reason. I don’t hunt mostly because I’m not much of a morning person. I’m also not a very woodsy person. And I’m definitely not much of a rip the gushy squishy insides out of a dead animal so I can eat it later person. And I don’t cook. Look, I could. I know how to do all of those things, I just don’t want to. I prefer to leave it to the professionals, and those enthusiastic amateurs who actually enjoy it. Have at it.
So like I said, I have no problem with hunting, especially deer or boar or turkey or the like, because they are both plentiful and tasty. But we need boundaries. There are some things we probably should not hunt…
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, you should never, ever, hunt anything named “Cecil”. Why? Because anything named “Cecil” is probably adorable, like totally adorable, and if you kill it, people will hate you.
Next, let’s say don’t hunt endangered animals. Why? Because they’re fucking endangered. Seriously, how are we not grasping this concept? Endangered. As in, there’s not enough of them. Don’t kill the few we have left.
Lastly, let me say, if you enjoy the challenge and accomplishment of going out and hunting and killing your own food and preparing and providing it to your family and friends, good for you — that’s what a hunter does. We will seek you out when the apocalypse comes.
But, if you enjoy going out and killing things just for the sake of killing them, we have a word for people like that. We call those people “psychopaths”.