Conversation me and P had a few days ago when getting out of the car. We heard several gunshots and P said ” what was that?” my reply “Sounds like hunting season.” This made me start thinking about hunting. I have no problem with hunting for food. I spent many mornings tromping around in the woods when I was younger.

I haven’t ever shot anything but I completed the hunter safety course and (then) I would have been able to shoot something if I had been inclined to. I would eat a lot less meat if the only way I could get it was to kill it myself. Someone mentioned (on the interwebz) a few days ago they objected to hunting but didn’t object to buying meat at the grocery store even though she admitted the animals were treated horribly.

I can’t understand that at all. Is an animal who has been free and probably done just as it wanted its whole life more valuable than one who was bred and born for the sole purpose of ending up on someone’s plate? If anything I have the exact opposite attitude. If you are confronted with this beautiful creature that is alive and in its natural surroundings and you choose to take that animals life you remember the gravity of what you did every time you eat a part of it. The sheer nastiness of butchering that animal would be recalled with every meal.

When you go to the grocery store and pick up a pack of hamburger or steak you don’t think about where that nice tidy package came from. You never think about how much suffering and misery that chicken/cow/pig went through in a crowded nasty industrial farming operation so you have no motivation to cut back on eating meat.

Anyway, I’ll climb down off this soapbox because I have gotten side-tracked from studying again and I am really not ready for my Anatomy test tomorrow. Remind me to post about how I’ve lost my freakin mind and am changing my major and transferring to another school to get a degree that will probably take me even longer to complete. Fun times I am sure.