Re: Have you killed a living animal?
Originally Posted by
fender
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I've been a shooter / gun enthusiast all my life.
However, I don't shoot animals and never have, probably never will.
I clay shoot and target / combat shoot and that's where it ends.
We're not all a bunch of nasties......
I too enjoy my shooting , 99% on the range but non the less maybe the odd rabbit or pheasant for the pot ... but then whilst hunters get a bad name let’s look at realities .... take a pheasant shoot ( my brother actually runs a pheasant shoot so I could get actual figures ) and they buy a few thousand poults in the spring , manage the land all year usually by sowing sunflowers , they feed them all summer .... then they shoot them .... argh !!!!!
Only the other week we were chatting and I asked how many they shot last season .... about 80 I guess he replied so that’s a few thousand wild pheasants running free that otherwise would never have even been born , indeed most of the wild pheasants you see are probably down to shoots as left to nature the pheasant would possibly be on the endangered species list years ago ..
Then there’s rabbits , I have a good farmer friend who begs us to shoot on his land as it’s over run with the things ( I could shoot there 24/7 for a year and not even put a dent in the rabbit population) making many of his fields useless for horses etc ( they fall in rabbit holes /break legs) ... and then there’s rabbit life expectancy itself , how many rabbit skeletons do you see when out and about? Do you see retired rabbits sat on the roadside reading the paper ? No of course not as in the wild very very few things ever live to die of old age as everything , rabbit pigeon pheasant mice EVERYTHING gets zapped as soon as it’s just that second too slow so a hunter taking the odd rabbit ? It’s nothing especially as I don’t know anyone who shoots who if he couldn’t get a 100% clear head shot instant kill would even pull the trigger and I’d go as far as too say whilst I’ve seen many misses on a range ( shooting far great distances ) I’ve never ever seen anyone miss a rabbit , that is how certain one is before pulling the trigger ..
Then there’s vermin , rats , squirrel etc ... I don’t bother but many do go shooting vermin and looking at the damage they cause possibly in some locations their hobby keeps disruption down and you don’t even realise it .
I own a small fast fishing boat and whilst I don’t get out half as much as I’d like I’d say apart from makeral and cod anything and everything else we catch is released unharmed ... my passion is fly fishing yet I dislike the taste of trout ... you guessed it ... back in the water ...
Personally I don’t give a monkeys what your views are on hunting in the uk but whilst you tuck in to your Greg’s sausage roll or McDonald’s chicken nugget remember the guy who takes the odd dinner from the wild is taking an animal that had a far better life than your factory produced ‘thing’