Hunting Season Starts Tomorrow

I've never had a better piece of meat than the venison at Chop House in AA. I don't think it's still on their menu, this was 8-10 years ago.

Yep, my High School allowed us to leave at Noon to go deer hunting on 11/15 and did not mind if students skipped the day or even that week to hunt. I bet things have changed from the 70s and they probably don't allow it anymore. We use to bring our rifles to school back then on 11/15. Even during pheasant season (back when MI had a lot of pheasants) kids would have their shotguns in their pickup trucks at school.

It was an excused absence for us.

You make great points about the ethical justifications for hunting, but MGoOhNo isn't entirely wrong about deer starving. Michigan's ecosystem evolved to have apex predators in it. The vast, vast majority of those predators are now gone, either killed by humans or crowded out of a human-dominated environment that they can't live in. The resulting imbalance causes an overabundance of deer relative to their food supply, so food becomes the population limiting factor, thus the starvation. Is it better to be shot than to starve to death? That's an ethical question that probably doesn't have a definitive answer, but I'm inclined to suggest that since human hunters are essentially just replacing the predation we displaced in the first place, the overall better solution is hunting, yes, even for the deer's own benefit.

And all that doesn't even address the larger ecological impacts of a lack of predation (see the Yellowstone wolves), or that an overabundance of deer increases car/deer collisions, which both kill the deer and cause damage to human property. But like you said, it's not hard to justify hunting, as long as overhunting is avoided.

EDIT: I am not a hunter, and don't plan to do so. I don't think I'd have the stomach for it. So this defense isn't in self-interest.

Glad to hear there are more like me who are pro-hunting but don't want to shoot one of these animals. I went out once with rifle in hand but I couldn't pull the trigger. There is a level of hypocrisy to it but I can live with it.

clord, i appreciate your impassioned comments, but you might want to consider a few things about your logic.  you are totally on board with me 'harvesting' my cattle here at the farm, what amounts to our own 'slaughterhouse', but somehow deer have a privileged status and shouldn't be touched?  even when they lay waste to crops and total cars?  

nobody i know takes does when they have young fawns and hunting season is during a time when the spring fawns are grown and able to fend for themselves. that's a bambi argument that is appealing but false in practice.

and to echo another poster, it's not like when it's time for a deer to die they rise gracefully to cervid valhalla.  instead, they die of disease, starve, freeze, are ripped apart while still alive with a bear or a host of coyotes tearing at them, etc.  

and it is part of the dominion mandate that we humanely manage animals and their populations as well as harvest them.  if you have a better idea for deer, please share it. 

Fortunately, hunting season doesn't occur when fawn are reliant on their mother to eat or for protection. If you've given up meat, your logic is consistent. If you eat meat but would rather it be raised in a confined space, pumped with drugs and killed by strangers then I believe you are full of shit.

Makes your heart skip a beat don't it! Same goes for a cock pheasant busting cover 10 feet in front of you cackling and the flourish of feathers.