how different is hunting from going to the grocery store and getting a rabbit

Very different. Wild animals generally live as well as animals can (with the exception of well-loved pets) with a great deal less suffering than animals stuffed into cages and pens and slaughtered under factory conditions. A competent hunter kills his or her prey with a minimum of suffering, and I've seen a skilled hunter take down a deer before it even knew what happened. I doubt that most animals that end up in the supermarket are allowed to live and die so well.

I find trophy hunting repulsive, however, and I am aware that even hunting for food can cause an animal unnecessary suffering. On one of my first hunting trips, I asked my father why we aimed for the heart, lungs, and liver of a deer instead of the head (I suppose I'd seen too many action movies). He pointed out that you have a larger margin of error when you aim for the thorax. Ideally, you aim for the heart, but if you hit the lungs or (preferably) the liver, the deer will still die quickly. If you aim for the head, and you shoot poorly, you could merely blind the deer, or shoot off its jaw, in which case the animal would die painfully of starvation. It wasn't until then that I appreciated the awesome responsibility that a hunter has to hunt as humanely as possible.

In regione caecorum, rex est luscus.

I have no problem with hunting. I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, where hunting is just part of life. There's a reason opening day of deer season is on Saturday: if it was a weekday no one would show up to work. Even among my liberal-leaning alt.rock suburban pseudo-bohemian friends there was a 50-50 chance that hanging next to their Cure/Black Flag/Bauhaus poster was a framed photo of their first deer.

Me, I've never fired a gun (BB guns, yes, real guns, no). I have no desire to own a gun that fires anything more powerful than a nerf dart or a stream of water (or tequila). I wish there were a lot fewer guns out there. I wish my gun-owning friends didn't feel so unsafe in their upscale suburban enclaves (far safer than the actual city where I dwell) that they felt the need to carry handguns when they go to the mall.

OK, got a picture of me in your mind? Get rid of the ponytail. I cut my hair back in '97.

I have no problem with hunting. If someone wants to get up at 3:30 and drive 100 miles out into the woods in a freezing rain in the hopes of shooting some meat, godspeed. I'll be back at the house preparing the side dishes. More accurately, I'll be sleeping in until 10, then relaxing on the couch surfing the net and drinking coffee with the heater on until I get a phone call saying you're on the way home with a deer. Then I'll get up and put a couple of spuds in the oven.

Cruelty? Food is cruel. I would argue that factory farming (we've all read the descriptions and seen the videos) is crueler than hunting. Given a choice between living in a cage for a year then being killed and living in your natural habitat for 3 years then being killed, which would you choose? Unless you want to follow a critter around for its whole life then pounce on it the moment it dies of old age, there's going to be a certain amount of violence involved in obtaining meat. Personally, I'm OK with that. If I was truly committed to a diet without violence and conflict then I'd live solely on food grown from my personal organic garden fertilized with my own waste. I'm not going to do that.

So, speaking for myself, don't lump all us anti-gun liberals in together with PETA. Load up, good hunting, and I'll see you for dinner.

-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things.

My mother just forwarded this to me, and it seemed too apropos not to pass it on....

A man kills a deer and takes it home to cook for dinner. Both he and his wife decide that they won't tell the kids what kind of meat it is, but will give them a clue and let them guess. The kids were eager to know what the meat was on their plates, so they begged their dad for the clue.

Well, he said, 'It's what Mommy calls me sometimes'.

The little girl screams to her brother, "Don't eat it, it's an asshole !"

I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and I have to fess up to having a real taste for squirrel. It's a lean meat that's not at all gamy tasting, and it's usually pretty tender as well (as long as the squirrel's not too old, anyway). Generally, squirrel will substitute in pretty well for chicken in any recipe you might have. Some family favorites include parboiling the squirrel and then browning it in oil, parboiling and then dipping it in egg and crushed saltine cracker crumbs and frying that in oil, squirrel and dumplings (just like chicken and dumplings, except with squirrel), and squirrel meat pie (standard meat pie recipe, except with squirrel). It's good, cheap protein, and doesn't even really require hunting. Although you generally need a license to hunt squirrel or to leg trap them for their meat or hide, squirrels can be live trapped fairly easily (which is legal, even without a license, in most places). Once you've got them in the live trap, well, I'll leave it to your imagination. Needless to say, figuring out a humane way to dispatch a small animal shouldn't be all that hard for most enterprising TnTers. Once that's done, just clean the carcass like you would a rabbit and you're pretty much good to go. Most of the meat is on the back thighs (more than you'd think, really), but there's a decent bit on the ribs and front legs as well.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was handed a machete which I wielded to slit the throat of a goat. I probably made a hash of it causing the animal unneccesary pain -- but the central point is that I have no problems with killing animals to eat them. Killing animals just for grins strikes me as a bit useless/perverse which is why I've never really grokked safaris to kill lions et al.

What hunters won't tell you however is that when you hunt - especially birds, what you wind up eating is   as likely to send you to the dentist as it is to fill your stomach. Unlike factory grade USDA prime meat, game meat tends to have pellets which no matter how diligent you are, often wind up on your plate. Bite down on a pellet and your orthodontist will be thinking about having a third kid.

Separate from that - I read an article recently on how sushi in NY has relatively high levels of mercury in it. For a sushi fan such as myself, this is disheartening. Still - I have no idea what sort of toxins wild animals have in them.

My favored form of hunting is to go into the seafood restaurant and pick my fish out of the aquarium.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

My relatively small backyard is currently occupied by no fewer than 9 deer, at least 5 of which could be saddled and ridden.  However, living as I do inside the Beltway, my options are limited.  Perhaps I can rent a pride of lions.

I even pick up the worms off the sidewalk after it rains and capture the spiders to put them outside. Now silverfish, those I won't hesitate to go after. But having changed my diet over the last couple years to emphasize things that were once living, I've come to think it would be important for me to get that much more in touch with the process.

I don't have a moral problem with mass produced food like chicken, fish and vegetation. Morally, my take has always been that it wouldn't live if it weren't meant to die. Still, wild things do seem to taste better and when you know the difference there's something vaguely deadening about knowing that what you're eating never truly lived. Morally, is it better to have given them terrible lives that it was charitable for us to end? Or should all things have the opportunity to know a life? Obviously this an impractical question whose answer isn't enforceable in a world market economy. But I think it actually reveals the moral laziness in the anti-meat community.

Oh and rabbit is fantastic.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

One of my college friends raised rabbits for food...at least, he said they were for food, but I never once saw any rabbit meat in his house, nor did I ever see him demonstrate how easy it was to kill and clean one, and his line of hutches got longer and longer all the time.