Perhaps I don't know much about hunting because I'm not a hunter. I've never even owned a gun. In fact, I even told that nice telemarketing lady from the National Rifle Association that I consider gun ownership to be a form of severe mental deficiency.

But to be a real hunter you've gotta have lots more than just a gun. You've gotta have lotsa guns, a different kind of gun for each kind of critter you want to shoot. You've gotta have fancy leather things to carry your guns around in. You've gotta have a fancy hardwood gun cabinet in your home to store your guns in. Then you've gotta dress right. It takes special camouflage clothes and boots and a cute orange hat and even special underwear to go hunting. Then you've gotta have a tree stand and a special ladder to get up into your tree stand and a camouflage net to put over your tree stand and a super-deluxe first aid kit with splints and everything for when you fall out of your tree stand. Then, if you're lucky enough to bag a deer, you've gotta have a wheelie-trolley to lug the deer back out of the woods. And don't forget to bring your clearing-axe to clear a passageway for your wheelie-trolley. Then you've gotta have a four wheel drive pickup truck (that's a "pickum-up truck" here in southern Maryland) to haul all this stuff around in.

Oh yes. There's lotsa other stuff like skinning knives and meat smokers and a gun rack for your "pickum-up truck" and don't forget the NRA bumper stickers and I'm sure any of you hunters reading this can think of lotsa other stuff I've forgotten or maybe I've never even heard of.

Here in southern Maryland the True Measure of Manhood is how much money you've sunk into hunting equipment. Hunters spend hours in bars bragging about how much stuff they've got and how they've gotta have top-of-the-line everything. In fact I think if you compute the cost of all that stuff against the meat they bring home, I think we're talking about venison at $4,572.98 a pound. Such a deal!

I think the true test of hunting prowess oughta be what you could catch if you went strolling into the woods stark naked, carrying nothing, and had to bring down your umpteen-point buck with nothing but your fingernails and your teeth. Now, wouldn't that really be more sporting?

I've occasionally heard the argument made that hunting is actually not as cruel and inhumane as livestock raising. Well, maybe that's true, maybe not. You'd think that we could develop humane methods of livestock raising, not to mention that the high cost of hunting precludes it from ever replacing a significant part of our livestock industry. Then too, the necessity for meat in the human diet has not been conclusively established. Many vegetarians appear to enjoy excellent health.

And then there's the argument that we need to hunt to control the population of prey species so they don't overbrowse the world and end up starving themselves to extinction. Well, this only happens because we've exterminated natural predators. Now, the reason we exterminated the predators is so that we'd have a higher game population to hunt, so the argument basically flies up its own exhaust pipe. And maybe we shouldn't mention that natural predators weed out the weaklings of the flock but a human hunter with his high-tech weaponry seeks out the umpteen-point prize trophy buck to stuff and mount in his den. The long-term result of this form of unnatural selection will eventually weaken instead of strengthen the prey species.

Now I'm not insisting that hunting is necessarily unethical or immoral. Cats, wolves, alligators, and many other animals are hunters by nature, so if hunting is ethical for them the argument can be made that hunting might be right for us, too. In fact, I'm reminded about how tasty roast groundhog can be every time I see stuff in my garden that's been chomped into by groundhogs.

But I suspect hunting is probably unnatural to the human species for several reasons. First, our teeth and claws are remarkably inadequate to kill anything very effectively, so we've gotta resort to high-tech weaponry. Second, most of us find a bloody carcass of raw meat with guts hanging out, the way a natural predator prefers its food, to be a bit unappetizing. Third, every part of our entire digestive tract starting with lips and teeth and including the sharply hooked throat, relatively large stomach, and extremely long intestinal tract, practically screams VEGETARIAN at every point.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a vegetarian. I find parts of dead animals rather tasty if they're nice and cleaned up and cooked right. But I don't quite have it in me to go out into the woods and kill critters. I'd rather pay the livestock industry for my meat. I suppose if I had to kill my own, I'd soon become a vegetarian. Or maybe if I had a bit higher principles I'd become a vegetarian anyhow.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
People Eating Tasty Animals
Animal Concerns
A place to spend gadzillions of megabucks on hunting hardware
A nice site about nice animals
An opinion about how we treat nice animals