Hi guys, I'm new here.  I attend Humboldt State University, which is almost as bad as Berkeley, with all the pot-smoking, tree-hugging hippies.  This setting makes being a Forestry major very interesting, since many of these hippies think that all foresters are Evil incarnate.  Anyway, I digress.  One of my papers that I have to write is about Environmental Ethics.  The professor is very much against hunting and fishing, he thinks that they are unnecessary and cruel. I would like to focus my paper on dispelling these misunderstandings on his part (he's an armchair philosopher, so he has little or no "real world" experience in many of the natural resource fields he preaches about).  So I'm looking for some different justifications that people have for hunting and fishing.  Why do you do it?

Lol.  Why do I hunt?  I don't.  I just walk around till I spook them and then take a few shots.

[):)]
NSF

First, welcome! Now to answer your question. I hunt because it gives me more pleasure than just about anything elese in life, and I don't mean the killing part. I enjoy being in the outdoors in pursuit of something that has better senses than me and knows the area better than me. I don't shoot everything I see, I'm after one particular species on any outing and I enjoy the rest when I see them. I have been hunting deer for 27 years and I still get the rush of adreneline and the shakes when I see one while I'm hunting, when I stop doing that I'll stop hunting deer. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Whatever you do, don't "Bidenize" an ethics paper!

You need to look up topics like, "Wildlife Management," or possibly "Resource Management."

I like to hunt, but the Dept of Fish and Game wildlife biologist probably just thinks of me as a "resource management tool."  Hunters pay for the management of the natural resource, to make sure it is at a healthy level, as well as around for the future.  Non-management doesn't work very well as a resource policy.

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Nolle Illegitimi Carborundum

Try working this angle
We killed all the wolves,Then we killed all the cats. Now if we dont step in and pull their load,in five years we will have starving, parasite ridden deer in our backyards begging for food. I dont have the source but this has been proven in a mathematical projection done by some big ecology group. The day we stop hunting is the day the balance of nature will really go to sh*t

Have you ever thought about taking an economics approach to it? Hunting (utilization) of animals increases their economic value. The more valuable an animal is, the more people encourage the sustainment and even increase of that animal's population. Non-hunted animals are economically worthless and therefore their populations are not encouraged, in fact many are annihilated. Good example is elephants in Africa. In places where people own elephants, elephant hunting is economically valuable to those people and elephants are making remarkable come backs in those places because of this.

Welcome to AR15.com.  I've been reading the posts for a long time & just started posting here recently.

Meditations on Hunting - Jose Ortega Y Gassett

He says something like "One doesn't hunt to kill.  One kills in order to have hunted."  Just the thing for a "chairborne ranger" nonhunter.

Here is the Amazon address for it: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=s_sf_b_as/104-4864068-5755124

Get it from the library.  It's a fairly quick read.

Also, research the Kiabab Range, in AZ, I believe.  The overpopulation angle was proven very dramatically when hunting was abruptly stopped there in the early 1900's.  The deer ate everything in sight.

From one college student to the next...



I have to agree with Erasmus' recommendation. I would do the paper from the Wildlife Management aspect. Here in Michigan, we are experiencing a strain of Tuberculosis among our deer population. Our deer herds seem to get bigger every year. One herd took over one of our local parks and golf range (oh pitty!). They had just about eaten everything on the course and were pretty much starving to death. They showed the deer on TV. You could see their ribs, poking out through their sides. Your Dept of Natural Resources should have plenty of info about Wildlife and Resource Management. BTW, dont feel bad about being the only conservative in your group and dont think you are going to change any minds. When I was taking English Comp, I decided to do my paper on why gun control wouldnt work. My class was filled with Million Mom bitc...errr women types, who were totally against guns, but were more than happy to watch you fry in the electric chair, even if you were there by accident (I kid you not...one of their exact statements were, "well, I would hope it wouldnt be me, but sorry if it was a mistake"). Good luck on the paper.

My brother has pics somewhere of 30-40 deer carcasses in a depression. Game warden we ran into said they had already found them and had studied them, they died from starvation due to overpopulation. If he can find the pics i will scan them and email them to you. The soonest this could happen is thanksgiving weekend. I will call him tonight and see if he can find them.