5 Reasons Sport Hunting Rocks

Sport hunting rocks for many reasons. Virtue signaling isn't one of them. Sport hunters who virtue signal may be painting themselves into a narrow corner. Are they playing into the anti-hunters' divide-and-conquer tactics?

             * Claiming the moral high ground isn't the same as owning it.

             * We hunt for meat plus a lot more.

             * Sport hunting rocks because it saves wildlife from over exploitation and restores species to abundance.

Denouncing Sport Hunting as a Virtue Signal

This is the age of virtue signaling. And that bothers some people. Nevertheless, let me tell you something:

I don't go sport hunting. I hunt to feed my family

.

Signal sent. Did you receive it? Unlike thrill killers, frivolous sport hunters, and trophy hunters desperate to prove their manhood (even the women,) I indulge in hunting only because I have to. I’m keeping wife, kids, grandkids and even a bunch of friends from starvation.

Photos shows a hunter holding a moose loin to depict hunting for meat, but sport hunting is much, much more than mere survival.

Not only that, but I use every edible scrap from every wild mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, crustacean, mollusk, plant, and mushroom I kill. I waste nothing. I am one with the wolf, the fox, the elk. I eat 100 percent wild, natural, free-range, genetically unmodified, shade-grown food. Caught with my bare hands. While naked and praying for forgiveness. 

So na na na naaaaaaaa na.

Lies, Lies and Poetic License

Of course, as a virtue signaling hunter, I’m also lying. But allow me to call it hyperbole. Poetic license. I want to grab your attention and keep you reading so you get my more important message, which is this: virtue signaling does not enhance, protect, or increase the wild places and species we need, desire, and love. If we want to retain our hunting rights, we must appreciate the central role hunting plays in humanity and Nature. We need to understand and articulate why sport hunting is good for wildlife, wild habitats and humans.   

First, let’s examine hunting as virtue signaling and see how that works against our own self interests.

The biggest problem with claiming the moral high ground as a meat gathering purist is reality. In 21st century North America, at least, no one HAS to hunt in order to eat. Government handouts are available to feed everyone. So claiming you hunt only to stave off starvation brands you as poorly informed or prevaricating.

Once your “hunt to eat” critics have exposed you as a liar, you’re forced to explain why you really hunt. Which is…?

And now we’re back to the problem we’ve long faced while under attack by virtue signaling anti-hunters who eat only vegetation. "I don’t kill any innocent animals,” they brag.How do you counter that when you do kill "innocent animals?” Before we outline five good reasons to defend sport hunting, let's examine why vegans can't stay in the saddle of their moral high horse. 

3 Reasons Why Anti-Hunters and Vegans Aren't Morally Superior

1. First, don’t accept your critics’ claims that they do not kill wild things. They do. They’re just not courageous enough to admit it. If they eat only domestic meats, they are hiding behind surrogate butchers. If they eat only fish, mollusks and crustaceans, they are making judgement calls on which innocent animals deserve to be “harassed, tortured, and murdered” for their selfish, gluttonous desires. Everyone must eat to live. Hunters just choose to do it the old fashioned way, Nature's way, hands-on and interacting with the ecosystems that keep us alive. 

2. Even the strictest vegans kill animals. The Mississippi River forests were not razed to grow more whitetails, black bears and wood ducks. They were converted to hundreds and hundreds of square miles of flat, mono-cultured fields in which to grow soybeans. Tofu, anyone? The Great Plains grasslands were plowed into oblivion to grow wheat for bread and pasta, not more pronghorns and bison for sport hunting. California’s Napa Valley no longer supports grizzly bears because its wetland bottoms have been made safe for growing wine grapes. Illinois prairies weren’t converted to corn and soybean fields so hunters would have more prairie chickens to shoot. Deer are fenced out or shot to protect carrots, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, peas, beans... for vegans.

3. The simple truth is that vegetarians and vegans create demand for more domestic crops, crops that must be planted where wild plants and animals once thrived. Millions of plants and animals per acre — from orchids and buttercups to butterflies and bison — are killed outright or pushed out. Domesticated grains, fruits and vegetables must be fueled by artificial fertilizers (gas drilling, manufacturing plants, truck transport, air pollution, nitrates leaching into ground water.) Millions of acres are doused with pesticides, killing small rodents, birds, and butterflies that might have tried moving in. Herbicides are sprayed by the gallons to kill any competing plants. Many fields are fenced to keep out hungry deer, bears, and birds. Animal damage control (kill permits) are issued to protect crops from marauding wildlife.

Moral high horse? Anti-hunters are riding three-legged Shetland ponies. If you are alive on planet Earth, you’re killing wildlife.

5 Good Reasons To Celebrate Sport Hunting

Now, how are you going to explain your "sick desire" to hunt down and kill wild animals? Honestly. There's nothing sick about sport hunting, a phrase coined in the 19th century to set it apart from uncontrolled market hunting. So explain it honestly. Here’s a list of perfectly valid reasons to enjoy sport hunting. You may have more, but these are a good start.

1. Sport hunting is fun. Absolutely. Like climbing a mountain, floating a river, building a campsite, starting a campfire, finding mushrooms, picking berries, and growing carrots, sport hunting is a delightful, fulfilling, natural, honest, joyful interaction with the natural world. How else can you explain the anticipation, the longing, the sheer joy and sense of freedom we get when we hunt? It is serious fun and does put organic food on the table, but it's still fun. Watch a hunting dog work a field for birds and you'll begin to appreciate the passion that drives human sport hunters. Hunting is fun. Admit it. Own it. Embrace it. 

Photo shows five smiling women hunters, dramatizing fun, one of the many reasons sport hunting rocks.

2. Hunting is human. Humans became what we are today because we cooperated to find food, to hunt. This encouraged tool building, advanced communication, language, planning, cooperation and sharing. Hunting tied families and communities together. Sport hunting still does. Nature gave humans the stereoscopic vision of a predator, not the side-vision of prey. 

3. Sport hunting is reaffirming. Some humans can spend their lives happily in urban environments. Others need intimate connection with the land and the wild things that live upon it. We need to be challenged by Nature, to successfully forage from her abundance in order to earn our place, to feel fully alive, fully a part of the cycle of life. 

4. Hunting is natural and essential. Really. Because humans have radically altered most habitats, we’ve severely disrupted the “balance” of nature. It’s more an equilibrium than balance, but ignoring it condemns some species while unfairly benefiting others. Whitetail deer are a classic example. With wolves and other large predators largely extirpated from the Midwest to make it safe for humans, deer can quickly overpopulate. They are aided by an abundance of human-produced forage like corn, alfalfa, beans, and backyard roses. In many areas closed to sport hunting, whitetails have completely destroyed woodland understory, killing off dozens of small birds and mammals like thrushes, warblers and ruffed grouse. Elephants do even more damage to forests in some African parks. Sport hunting has been used and can be used even more to control potential wildlife imbalances while utilizing these natural resources. Would we rather have more wild herds of deer, elk, moose, buffalo, and kudu providing protein, or domestic cattle, goats and sheep? 

Photo shows denuded riverine woodlands ruined by too many elephants. Hunting can reduce such overpopulation abuse and benefit the biotic community, another of the reasons we hunt.

5. Sport huntinghelps protect and perpetuate wildlife and wild places. This is a tough one to sell because it requires more than a knee-jerk reaction from listeners. Conservation hunting, another name for sport hunting, has a long, strong track record of success. At is core is passion, that proprietary feeling a hunter develops toward the game and fish he or she hunts. I discovered it a year or two into my legal hunting career. As soon as I realized that plowed fields and overgrazed grasslands precluded the pheasants, cottontails and deer I loved to hunt, I began fighting against human activities that compromised wildlife habitat. While classmates focused on sports teams and drag racing, I fought against wetland drainage and winter plowing. I built bluebird and wood duck nest boxes and planted hundreds of trees on the family farm. I joined conservation groups and worked to defend and increase wildlife habitat because, through my hunting, I’d come to know and love the birds and animals that depended on it. Game or non-game species mattered not. Big bluestem grass, purple prairie coneflowers, burrowing owls, and lark buntings were just as important to me as pronghorns, mallards, and mule deer. This is the love of Nature that often comes from hunters' intimate interactions with Her. 

I suspect most of the hunters reading this share this passion. It's why we have organizations like Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, the National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and so many more volunteer, fund-raising and habitat-protection non-profits. It's why sport hunters contribute millions of dollars to wildlife and its habitat. This was the same passion that drove hunters like Teddy Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell to start the Boone & Crockett Club and end market hunting. They and other sport hunters established closed seasons, bag limits, season limits, hunting licenses, national wildlife refuges, game wardens and the entire North American Model of Wildlife Conservation program. Sport hunting programs have saved dozens of species from extinction and brought many roaring back, aided and abetted by hunters' dollars and political clout.

Embrace all your reasons for hunting because sport hunting is not a one-reason avocation. It's more than meat, more than mere survival. It's a philosophy, a lifestyle, a passion for connecting intimately to the real world. As for virtue, it has always been it’s own reward. Virtue signaling is it’s antithesis. Don't let anti-hunters paint you into the virtue signaling corner of hunting just to eat.

There is no dichotomy between loving wildlife and loving sport hunting.Sport hunter, photographer, camper, backpacker, angler, birder, amateur naturalist and venison lover Ron Spomer has been fighting for wildlife, wild places, and humankind's hunting heritage for more than half a century.