You… you… capitalist!

Paul

Nick,
Well-argued, and I pretty much agree with you. You’ve gotten more replies to this in a couple of days than anything recently, and it’s not directly related to UFOs! Maybe I’ll finish my piece on Intelligent Design and put it up soon. Hot-button topics drive the traffic!

I agree with you 100% re: killing for sport.

As for the rest, I stress again the “all politics are local” mantra. One should never be too worried why people are motivated to be concerned; one should be thankful that they have been.

Or, to borrow another wll-known phrase, politics can make for strange bedfellows.

Paul

I actually agree with you that many hunting and fishing types have a greater appreciation of the outdoors world than do city types.

However, as I have stressed, I was not targeting hunters because they are hunters. If people hunt for food, then I have no problem with that; because it is indeed correct to say that people who eat meat have no right to complain if hunting goes on, when their beef or chicken comes from a slaughter-house.

However, I really don’t see how killing animals for fun, pleasure or sport (however people want to describe it) is justifiable. Or how people *can* even derive pleasure from it. But that’s just my view.

I can’t even imagine how mounting a deer’s head on someone’s living room wall can be seen as a good thing. Maybe it’s a cultural thing that I don’t understand. If so, then so be it.

The whole point of my blog-post was this: I was dismayed that people are getting worried about their ability to kill animals rather than focusing on the bigger picture. And that’s it.

Hypothetically, if the article had been based around water-skiers who were complaining that they could no longer water-ski on their favorite lake because GW had dried the lake up, my comments would have been directed at them.

The issue (to me at least) is not whether the comments were made by hunters, water-skiers, policemen, doctors, lion-tamers, or pole-dancing strippers.

My point is that human beings (collectively) when faced with an issue that *may” turn out to be devastating to our world, should worry more about the future of the world and less about things that are far down the scale - such as killing animals for sport.

I think you’ll find that many hunters and fishers (not all, of course) are some of the most ardent environmentalists, because they have a much better appreciation of the delicate balance in nature than folks who spend all their time in the cities and super-malls, and whose entire knowledge of global warming (or, more appropriately, climate change) comes from seeing “An Inconvenient Truth”.

As for their motives, I think it’s usually a bit more complex than what you present, although I would add that the old political maxim, “all politics is local,” remains very true, i.e. most issues only resonate with us if they actually have an impact on something we do.

Paul

As for the “aliens” (or whatever they are), they will never help us. Ever. They are not our friends.

See my specific post (link below) of some time back on that: Why I Hate The Aliens

I just hope people get their priorities straight about what is important about the effects of global warming. The future of the planet is. The future of life on earth is. How it might affect some guy from bagging a few deer and duck is not.

I understand what you are saying, but I think that you (and others) have totallty missed my point.

As I noted in my reply to Paul Kimball’s comment on this above: my sheer amazement and disbelief was based not on the fact that these people are hunters (depsite what you say, I do recognize that this is a part of US culture and as a non-American, it’s not my place to say that the way they live is wrong); but on the fact that with respect to Global Warming, their response was not how GW would affect their families and future generations; but how it would affect their ability to kill animals.

Would I go hunting? No I wouldn’t. But I *am* tolerant of people whose cultural activities are different to mine - just in the same way that I will do absolutely whatever is necessary to uphold my way of life and my cultural activities.

So being tolerant of hunters (or not) has nothing at all to do with my amazement about the original story.

I am (as above) absolutely amazed, however, that with the environment possibly collapsing in the next 100 years (if not before), all these people seem to be worrying about is whether it will adversely affect their ability to bag a few deer and duck.

My point is that their priorities concerning GW demonstrated in the article are vastly off-track - not a debate on whether hunting should be tolerated or not.

Nick