Note: I decided to try a different approach to this topic. I saved the old version of this in a document so it isn't lost, but I figured there was a better way to approach this topic than the way I tried before.
I've been confronted with the question, "Why do you hunt?" many times ever since I started hunting. It's one of those questions that has the power to make one question everything they ever thought they knew. It's the kind of question that keeps hunters up at night. It's a question that has the power to turn a staunch hunter into a passionate vegan. But it's also a question that can further validate a hunter's motives and understanding of their passion for hunting.
I was confronted with this question the first time I posted a picture of myself on Instagram with my first tom turkey. I tagged the picture so it would show up when people searched for hunting related pictures, and interestingly, it was another hunter who asked me, "Why do you hunt?".
I realized that I couldn't answer his question with just a simple, one or two sentenced reply. Not even a few paragraphs would cut it. "Why do you hunt?" is not the same kind of question as, "Why do you like pasta?". It's a question that aims to dig down into the deepest parts of the soul, and it was a question that forced me to spend hours online researching scientific reasons for hunting, as well as look inward at myself and figure out, from a personal and emotional standpoint, why I hunt. That question even compelled me to spend $50 on books written by hunters and huntresses, to find out why they hunt, and see if I could relate. And, rather unsurprisingly, I shared a lot in common with them, but even I have my own unique reasons.
There are certainly a lot of scientific reasons behind why I feel like I feel obligated to hunt. Conservation is one of the main reasons why I hunt. Since Theodore Roosevelt came up with regulated hunting roughly 120 years ago, that's how hunting is run like today. It's heavily regulated so the wilderness can remain balanced and thriving. Due to the heavy regulations, hunting has been an extremely successful conservation tool and has revived hundreds of species from the brink of extinction. In 1900, around a year before Theodore Roosevelt became president, there were less than 41,000 elk, 500,000 whitetail deer, 100,000 wild turkeys, 700 bison, and no more than a few thousand pronghorn roaming around North America. Considering how huge North America is, those numbers were puny, and they don't even consider how close to extinction so many other animals in North America were at that time!
After regulated hunting became law in North America, and Theodore Roosevelt established millions of acres of state parks and public land to protect the wilderness, slowly but surely, wildlife recovered. Today, as of 2019, there are well over 1 million elk, 32 million whitetail deer, 7 million wild turkeys, 44 million ducks, and 1.1 million pronghorn roaming around North America. Even bears, wolves, and cougars have been spotted more often, including in places they'd previously gone extinct, all thanks to conservation efforts hunters have funded and helped with. These numbers, assuming regulated hunting continues, are expected to grow dramatically as time goes on. While it's true that wildlife die at the hands of hunters every year, their deaths are not in vain, and are, once again, heavily regulated.
Tags and seasons have been implemented to protect wildlife and document every animal a hunter kills. One tag a hunter purchases is equal to one animal. The tag specifies that animal in writing, along with what region, season, weapon, sex, and sometimes even age that animal is, as well as the hunter's name and identification number to specify that tag belongs to that hunter. It's illegal for a hunter to give his/her tag to someone else to fulfill. It's also illegal for a hunter to kill an animal that doesn't match the tag. A hunter with a buck tag cannot legally shoot a doe. A hunter with a tag in region 9 cannot cross the fence into region 10, even if his target animal was just in region 9 but hopped the fence into region 10. A hunter with a tag with a week-long season cannot legally hunt with that tag once the season is over. So on and so fourth.
Hunters do not hunt deer, elk, moose, or pronghorn during fawning season (spring and summer). That is a lie propagated by anti-hunting activists. Those pictures you see of dead does with fawns laying next to them had been killed by cars in places where the deer population is overpopulated, likely due to lack of hunting, not by the bullet of a legal hunter. If anything, those pictures should motivate more people to get into hunting, rather than deter them from it.
Hunting season for those animals, and all other animals who need to be with their young during the spring and summer months, happens in the fall when the fawns are old enough to fend for themselves and are preparing to go off on their own anyway. Also, bucks and bulls don't stay behind to take care of the does or the fawns during any time of the year. Once they breed, the bucks and bulls go hang out together in bachelor herds for the spring and summer months, then turn on each other as soon as rutting season begins. Meanwhile, the does and cows are busy trying to survive and caring for their young. When the fawns grow up to be yearlings in the fall, they become independent from their mothers. The does will usually stay with their mothers longer than the bucks, because does stick together until spring fawning season. When fawning season begins, the pregnant does separate to care for their fawns alone. Meanwhile, the bucks will usually run off to participate in the rut even before they are fertile and have a good rack of antlers to fight other bucks with.
The only people allowed to hunt whatever animals they want outside of hunting seasons are Native Americans, as a part of a treaty. But even then, they are only allowed to hunt on their tribe's reservation.
Everything runs purely on instinct. There's very little emotion going on behind the eyes of the elk, deer, or bears. Wildlife don't live in excess like we do. They haven't had time to evolve a conscious mind like ours. They've been too busy trying to survive for millions of years. Whitetail deer haven't changed in any way, shape, or form for at least 3 million years. Pronghorn antelope are the only remaining species of their kind. They're an ancient species, having survived several mass extinctions, and haven't biologically changed since they moved into the southwestern USA about 30,000 years ago. But even the southwestern pronghorn of today don't look much different than the northern species they came from so many thousands of years ago. These ancient animals have never felt true love or grief before in their lives, and hefty doses of adrenaline likely numb any pain they feel when the inevitable happens.
A mother deer does not feel true love towards her fawns. In fact, for the first few weeks of a fawn's life, the doe will leave her fawn alone in the wilderness, only coming back once or twice a day to feed her fawn and move it elsewhere. This is because the doe doesn't want to attract predators to herself or her fawn. She will continue to hide her fawn up to a mile away from her, until her fawn is old enough to keep up. If a doe comes back and finds that her fawn is missing, she won't grieve for it or even look very hard for it. She'll just count her losses and move on. She won't come looking for her baby once she's determined it is gone. People who find fawns alone in the woods, and take them to wildlife offices because they believe it's "orphaned", are only killing the fawns. Most wildlife offices will not try to raise the fawn themselves, because otherwise that fawn will have to live in captivity for the rest of its life. Instead, they'll just put the fawn down, since its mother will not come back to her fawn once she realizes its missing.
After hunting season ends, the winter begins. When winter finally settles in, usually all of the edible foliage has died, migratory birds have flown south (except for Canada Geese since they figured out people will just feed them all of the time if they stay in the city year-round), the trees have turned bare, and the bears have gone into their dens to hibernate. The remaining animals, especially the remaining game animals, really struggle through the winter. They have to rely on the fat on their bodies and the stubble they can dig out of the snow to survive. Many animals don't make it, especially the biggest, oldest bulls and bucks who are well past their prime. Without hunters, there would be way too many animals for a winter ecosystem to sustain, resulting in a lot more animals dying. With hunters, while the population of non-migratory wildlife does dip in the winter, the population loss is quickly recovered by the spring fawning season.
If hunters weren't around to help manage the wildlife, a lot more animals would starve to death during the winter, and there wouldn't be enough surviving animals to make up for the winter population loss. Like I said, winter wildlife rely mostly on their fat to survive. If there were no hunters to kill off some of the animals in the fall, when they are fattening themselves up while simultaneously fighting with each other over breeding rights, there will be less grass for the game animals to fatten themselves up on, and more game animals to fight. This fighting burns up a lot of calories. Less grass + more animals = leaner winter wildlife. Lean winter wildlife rarely, if ever, make it to spring. But hunters help to balance out the wilderness, so there's more grass for less wildlife, which means more wildlife make it to spring to have more offspring.
When hunting gets banned, things go very wrong very fast. Anti-hunting activists love to stand on the moral high ground, because they believe they are not contributing to the death of wildlife if they aren't looking at them through a scope. Unfortunately, where they stand is not actually the moral high ground. While anti-hunting activists don't kill animals like I do, they have much more blood on their hands, and it's not blood from honorable kills. Their ideas, when implemented, have only been detrimental to the wilderness and wildlife. Anti-hunting groups successfully killed all of the lions in Botswana by fervently advocating for, then enforcing, a commercial lion hunting ban in Botswana. Due to this, lions in that country have basically gone extinct, and Botswana continues to be a lion black hole.
Every lion that steps into Botswana outside of the country's little nature preserve is shot and killed by citizens and poachers. The citizens in Botswana rely on their livestock to survive. Predators like lions not only threaten their livestock, but they threaten their lives as well. There are countless stories of people being dragged out of their homes by hungry lions, or killed by a pride in broad daylight in front of entire villages. Because of this, the government has permitted certain groups of citizens to kill every lion they see. And, if the citizens don't kill them first, surely, Botswana's numerous poachers won't have a problem killing the lions.
Lions are also very territorial animals. They are constantly on the lookout for more land to claim as their own, so obviously, since there are very few lions in Botswana, other lions cannot help but cross the border to claim that empty territory in Botswana. All of the other countries surrounding Botswana have very healthy lion populations since they allow trophy lion hunting, but those countries lose a good portion of their lions to Botswana.
How did it get to this point? Well, trophy hunting brings in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars into impoverished African countries every year. At least, trophy hunting funds the countries that allow it. Countries that don't allow trophy hunting don't get those funds. Trophy hunting money compensates citizens for livestock lost to the lions, as well as for crops destroyed by elephants and giraffes, so the citizens not only tolerate those animals, but actively protect them from poachers. The money trophy hunting brings in also forces the government to come up with conservation and anti-poaching organizations, where sick, injured, and orphaned wildlife are rehabilitated, near-extinct species are bred back into existence then released into the wild, and anti-poaching officers are trained and then dispatched to patrol the wilderness in search of poachers to arrest. Without that money, none of these things would exist, and is why every place that bans trophy hunting, and even regular hunting, turns into one massive wildlife graveyard.
There's an argument that ecotourism will save the day. However, the wilderness and wildlife still need to be properly managed and maintained, and the only way to do that is to kill off animals that need to be killed for conservation reasons. The only reason why ecotourists have anything to admire today, is because of hunting. Without hunting, ecosystems will suffer tremendous consequences. Animals will suffer from disease and starvation. Wildernesses will become desolate because the overpopulated prey animals will eat all of the plants, including the roots and bark. Predators will die off when the prey animals die off. And pretty soon, there will be nothing to see. That's assuming government officials will be forced to stay out of everything completely. Otherwise, animals will still die at the hands of humans. They just won't be used. After being shot, their bodies will be left behind for the wilderness to take care of, like how California currently deals with their mountain cougars, instead of being used to the fullest extent by hunters. Where's the honor in that?
As a hunter, I deeply care about the wilderness more than almost anyone else. I hunt because I want to see more healthy animals roaming the wilderness, along with healthier plants and stronger trees. It actually shatters my heart whenever I think about what might be in store for wildlife and the wilderness in the near future. Anti-hunting campaigns are gaining traction, as more and more people fall for those emotional arguments. I desperately want to see lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, and every other endangered animal get off and stay off the endangered species list in my lifetime. The only way to do that is to allow those animals to be managed by hunters.
Aside from the boring science behind why I hunt, I've found that hunting is a very emotional activity for me. I don't really have many traditional roots to go off of. Most hunters I know got into hunting because their parents were hunters, while neither my parents or my grandparents (except for my paternal grandpa) were hunters. My grandpa Bob lost his ability to hunt a couple decades before I came along, due to a brain aneurysm he had in his 40s, and he rarely, if ever, told me his hunting stories. I only knew he hunted because of old pictures of him and the family posing with his kills. So I can't necessarily claim family tradition as a reason why I hunt.
My grandpa and one of my uncles posing with a Canada goose my grandpa hunted on the farm, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
However, my ancestors, as well as the ancestors of everyone else on the planet, were hunters. They had to be. It was either kill or be killed, eat or starve to death. It's also human instinct to hunt. Of course, people will argue that just because we did it in the past, doesn't mean it's ok to hunt now. But, hunting is different than any other past activity that we deem morally wrong today.
Scientifically, it's still needed to conserve and manage wildlife. As I mentioned before, without hunting, most animals on, or nearly on the endangered species list would go extinct, and pretty soon, very common species will end up going extinct as well. Biologically speaking, we are closer to wolves than we are to sheep. Our digestive systems are designed to get nutrition from both meat and plants. We have front-facing eyes that spot objects rather than movement. And, just because we use tools to hunt does not mean we aren't natural predators. Many other predatory animals, like crows and chimpanzees, also use tools to hunt. Not every predator uses only teeth and claws to hunt.
Emotionally, I think it's vital to human survival to trigger our ancient instincts every once in awhile, at least. Most of us, especially those of us who live in the western world, live in excess. Our lives are extremely easy compared to what our ancestors went through, which, while it has been tremendously helpful for human expansion, and has allowed us to invent things that were still considered science fiction no more than 20 years ago, has also been proven to have a detrimental effect on human health, both mentally and physically. Most people I know aren't as physically active as they should be. Even I am guilty of this. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so many other detrimental terminal diseases have increased due to a number of reasons, but most notably from obesity. Depression and anxiety are also much more prevalent these days, likely due to so many people leading stale lives.
It's scientifically proven that exercise and time spent in the outdoors have significant health benefits. Those who spend more time outside and moving around tend to have a lot less health issues than those who spend hours of every day, every week of every year, sitting in front of a screen under a ceiling of fluorescent lights. Unfortunately, as time progresses, it seems as though less and less people are enjoying the wilderness, and have pent themselves up in office cubicles doing the exact same thing everyday. So, predictably, cases of terminal disease and mental health issues will likely continue to rise. Humans just aren't meant to live indoors. If we want to be the best version of ourselves, we have to cater to our human instincts to be outside and pursue a goal and/or a purpose in life.
Even though I recognize that most people can't see themselves as hunters, I do encourage people to get outside, even if it's just walking a few laps around a block or a stroll through a city park. However, I tend to my human need to be outside through hunting and fishing. I hate doing things without a purpose. To me, just to do it for exercise is not an adequate reason to get me on my feet. I need much bigger risks and rewards to get me on my feet.Hunting and fishing give me a real reason to get out there. They also motivate me to stay physically fit and healthy during the off-season, so when opening day comes around again, I'll be ready to go do it.
So, even though I think walking, hiking, and running for no reason is the most boring thing to ever do on the face of the earth besides watch paint dry, I'll do it to keep my body lean and fit in preparation for when hunting season arrives. Oftentimes, I'll walk through State Parks and hiking trails with a backpack full of fishing supplies. If and when I come across a body of water that possibly has fish in it, I can cater to my instinct to get my own food, and hopefully return home with a few fish fillets for the freezer. If I don't have the opportunity to do that, I'll take my dog for a walk. He's very fluffy, overweight, and has short legs, so he tires out a lot quicker than me. Usually, he'll make it about halfway around the park before stopping and refusing to continue, which forces me to lift his 35-pound body off the ground and carry him the rest of the way home. 35 pounds doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, after a half-mile of carrying that in your arms, you'll be begging to put it down. Once my dog is safely home, I'll go back out and complete my two-mile walk alone.
My job also requires me to have a certain level of physical fitness. I found out that I can't do CRM (data-entry) work for longer than 2o minutes without getting twitchy. I have to move around. So, I traded my CRM job for a job in the basement, sorting, filing, and running papers all around the office. When I'm not on my feet sorting papers by date and/or name, or putting said files into various filing cabinets around the basement, I'm quite literally sprinting up and down staircases, delivering paychecks and documents to my equally fast-paced coworkers. Real Estate, even for me, is a very fast-paced job, so I always have to be ready to dash up three flights of stairs in less than a minute to deliver something important to someone important, before their meeting starts or they're called out to a property way outside of town.
Still, I find myself unimpressed and even discouraged by my frail looks. I certainly don't look like I exercise as much as I do. I don't have any fat on my body, which might have something to do with it. But, at the same time, I do struggle to stay as nourished as much as I ought to be, which I'm sure contributes to my skinny profile too. People sometimes don't believe me when I tell them what I do for work, and what I do when I'm hunting. They need to see pictures. And, even when I do show them pictures of me hauling my kills to the butchering station after a hunt, or show them that I can in fact lift a 70 pound box of papers from one shelf to another across the file room at work, people still judge me for looking like a skeleton. I've gotten used to the criticism, but I still get annoyed by someone telling me I ought to eat more so I'll have more meat on my bones, like I don't eat 6,000 calories everyday already.
Hunting has at least proven to me, as well as to my doubters, that I can carry my own weight, literally and figuratively. I'm not nearly as weak or helpless as I look on the outside. This has been a huge confidence booster for me, since hunting has shown me that I'm a lot physically and mentally stronger than I used to think. However, hunting has only been able to do that because it will forever push me well beyond where I think I can go.