Permanently Deleted
i think hunting for food is awesome and the most ethical way to eat meat (besides dumpster diving it I guess).
if you don't like it or want to do it any more though, that's fine. consumer choice is an illusion under capitalism. we are all stuck within the confines of the capitalist plantation we live on. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but it's admirable that you try I guess.
I've gone grouse hunting a few times, a completely unnecessary activity that my friends and I justified as a "fun way" to get meat that we could otherwise get from a store. As someone who really enjoys and is pretty good at recreational target shooting, I had a great time and never even thought of those birds as anything other than targets, and then meat. It was pretty fucked, in retrospect. :im-vegan: now.
I have a friend who keeps trying to convince me that a deer hunt would be a good way to "ethically" supply myself with meat. I could probably find and shoot a deer. I have plenty of equipment, and family members who would be happy to take me out. It would provide enough meat that would last me months back in my carnist days. But I don't want to. I can go camping and shoot at stuff without killing anything. Clay pigeons are just as fun as the real thing.
When I was a kid my uncle used to take me crabbing every summer and that was just miserable. He'd dump the crabs out into the canoe to scare me and my cousin and I was always worried they were gonna pinch me. Then he would cook them alive, and even as a kid I thought that was really fucked up.
Yeah grouse have it pretty rough already with their habitat being destroyed by mines and pipelines. I definitely challenge the idea of "ethical" meat. In fact I think all meat is unethical. But so is a ton of other shit we all do on a daily basis. That sounds a bit :very-intelligent:
I'm just not really focused on meat as much as I am the overall safety of my immediate community. I have a lot of vegan friends and family, they are all mostly cool with my hunting, and we talk about food systems and mostly agree that hunting is way better for the environment, and while it's horrible to kill an animal anyway, the conditions in a factory farm are hell.
Online though, a lot of it is performative individualism, so I do my own performative individualism by reducing my reliance on farmed, processed, and transported foods.
I used to growing up. :im-vegan: now, but its theoretically a useful skillset to have, even if I'm morally conflicted about it. Like, its not a skillset I'd consider worth an animal's life. But also, man's gotta eat, and while in a survival situation or society collapse or w/e, I'd rather still forage and avoid meat, but if my options were hunt or starve, I'd choose hunting.
In a real way though, hunting may have led to me being vegan. I went with a group of family, and despite being chud's in lots of ways politically, they were pretty somber and upfront about it being taking an animal's life, and were 'respectful' about it, in the sense they weren't some shitty trophy hunter just wanting to KILL the BIGGEST, MEANEST creature. And, much like how working in a slaughterhouse can turn one away from meat, doing all the dressing and butchering ourselves drives home the vibe of, 'man, this meat stuff is a bit grizzly, huh?' Which, even younger, I helped with the butchering when I was like 6, as much as kids can help with anything, so its not like it was directly shocking to me. But it definitely hits different to look an animal in the eyes (even via scope) before shooting and killing it.
I've never fished, though I've been around fishing a ton, but that's just because I'm extremely allergic to seafood (along with tons of other foods).
this meat stuff is a bit grizzly
Grizzly is a bear, grisly is something that makes you feel gross or disgusted. The etymologies aren't related.
I don't, but I'm not strictly against it. Like obviously animals good and it's completely unnecessary for the vast majority of people, but maybe shit goes sideways and then it's a good skill to have.
I only did it because I thought my dad wanted to do it to bond but he only did it because he thought that I wanted to do it to bond
We never bonded btw
Plus I was and still am a terrible shot so I only ever bagged one deer
No one in my family ever took me hunting because I was an unreliable and sensitive kid. I taught myself, and I bonded with myself being out in the woods for 10 hours at a time in the cold, trying to figure out how to stay still and not get up and move all the time. I bought a gun and practiced shooting around the same time a lot of other people did the same. Then thought alright I'm confident I can quickly kill a deer and I have most of what I need, but it turned out to be a much larger commitment than I realized.
Capitalism unfortunately ruins the fuck out of any ecological argument that might have been more accurate even a few decades ago.
There are deer farms for repopulating hunting stock along with monetization schemes for hunting permits.
Many fishing groups also introduce invasive species into lakes and waterways to meet demand for hobbyist fishermen.
If you're going to hunt just avoid the really santitised/artificial places where they gut the animal for you, breed tonnes of animals on a relatively small piece of land, let you take photos like a wannabe trophy hunter, and stuff like that. That's some artificial commercialised stuff. It's becoming ever more popular where I live for some reason.
Oh and they inbreed deer into having disgusting and enormous bulbs of cancerous bone jutting wildly out of their head with 58 tines in order to make boomers feel insecure with their normal giant buck trophy, so that they shell out 25,000 dollars to blow the shit out of a penned deer.
Never hunted but I have fished. Honestly I've never seen the appeal - seafood is mid at best, cleaning and gutting fish sucks, and I could never seem to get all the little bones out. I guess there was a time when throwing a net in the water would allow one person to feed an entire village in a place where crops didn't grow, but the time for that is long since passed (and we've overfished so much that it isn't economical anymore unless you already own the boats). The best I can figure is that fishing is the closest thing humanity had to gacha/lootboxes before video games - you pay a lot in terms of time and you get randomly rewarded for it - and it tickles the same part of the brain.
There are small fish like anchovies, which are fantastic when fresh and don't require gutting.
In my part of Europe Gilt-head bream (apparently called in English), or "Dorade/a", is easy to clean and you can even make fillets easily, while using the leftovers for the soup or bouillon.
Use that bouillon when making a shrimp risotto.
All that is fairly simple and quick to make...
It feels kind of weird to be about to shoot a deer. You definitely hesitate, but you're mostly focused on waiting for a good opportunity to take the ethical shot, and you're excited about being able to harvest it. It was nothing really bad for me. I started about a decade ago - my now wife got me into it.
Antlers are nice but we don't put much stock into that. We'll hold off on antlerless harvest for the opening morning so as not to disturb the forest for people nearby who care about that more. But then after that we'll shoot a buck or a doe if we see one.
Whoever shot it is the main person to gut the deer and clean it, and the others just assist. We butcher it for steaks and bring the scraps to a place that does meat grinding for pretty cheap and also can make you summer sausage, bratwurst and things like that. Those are all a lot cheaper to get made than what it costs at the store. We might get like a meat grinder and sausage casings etc. at some point, but after you just hunted that feels like a lot. We don't get much time off work.
Last year my father in law and I got some chest-high waders, crossed a river and a swamp, and tried to take deer from a strip of inaccessible public land adjacent to some local petty bourgeoise psychopaths who refuse to properly manage the deer on their land, have an overpopulation of does, and lose their fucking minds when people kill a doe near them because they have a child's understanding of "more doe make big antlered buck". It really doesn't work that way for several reasons.
The intent was to take the bag limit of 6 does and donate all but one of them to this food charity nearby that accepts deer. When we got there all the deer were totally bedded down and the surrounding area was dead quiet, we probably heard 4 shots the whole day versus 200 to 300 in years prior. We'll get them next time - might try again this year. Climate change is fucking with their movement patterns though.
We get all those steaks, ground and sausages and keep it in a chest freezer. We give 1 or 2 pounds to a bunch of our friends and like 5 or 10 pounds to friends who are feeling those meat prices right now. We keep about half the deer I'd say.
It's the majority of our red meat throughout the year. It's really not gamey at all, because we promptly gut, cool, and clean the deer. Deer have fat but it's always trimmed because it doesn't taste good. The tenderloins are amazing and melt like butter. The steaks are so good- gotta be careful but if you time it right they're amazing. For burgers or other less-seasoned dishes, ground venison is maybe not the best, but in chili, pasta sauce, indian dishes and stuff like that, it's perfect. In some recipes you gotta add butter, tallow, or whatever you want to adjust for the leanness of venison.
Yeah I butchered the deer that I killed, I guess I should have mentioned that. I think the adrenaline of killing the first deer and the fact that the sun was almost down, it was cold, and I had to gut it and pack it out 3+ miles made it just feel like work and the urgency to do everything right and not waste anything felt really important... I took a moment to process my feelings, but I had put in so many hours and miles at that point that I was just really stoked. Eating the tenderloin that night was really nice. I think it set in the first time I cooked a meal, and then for a few weeks after I was processing the violence of taking the shot and watching a frightened and confused animal take its final steps.
But, it is a shitload of organic, freerange, blah blah blah meat that doesn't support anything besides the ammunition manufacturer.
I've thought about hunting for sustenance in an attempt to avoid factory meat, and hell ecologically speaking it can be not terrible if i were to focus on pest species like rabbit. I know i have the skills to make the shot, but I dont think i could emotionally handle cleaning. Fishing, I dont particularly care for, but there are some good fish in my area, so i do sometimes. for the time being though i just eat a mostly vegetarian diet until i can push myself to go full time.
I'm not down with hunting and never have been. However, I am an absolutely avid angler. Fishing is not about the catching part for me though, some of the best days fishing I've ever had I've caught absolutely nothing.
I know where you're coming from. I've enjoyed the not shooting hunting much more than the not catching fishing I've done. There is something about sitting out in the woods before the sun comes up, and waiting until the animals start ignoring you and just doing their own thing. There is something about fishing, and especially catching and killing fish that is especially brutal to me.
