I grew up in an hunting area too (South Dakota) and my dad was and is an ethical hunter — eats what he shoots and NEVER drinks while he’s hunting. He and his friends will be the first to criticize the shoot ‘em up drunken redneck hunters or game-farm customers, and animal rights activists who tar all hunters with the same brush lose a lot of potential allies against the worst offenders by doing so. We ate a lot of pheasant and venison while I was growing up, and it was a shock to later find those meats in pricey restaurants at premium prices — for us they were cheap substitutes for chicken and beef. As for vegetarians, my partner is a vegetarian who has no problem with hunting, and has said several times that she’d eat what my dad shoots long before she’d eat factory-farmed meat from the grocery store.

My husband and I both feel pretty strongly about this, but we are both ourselves the products of an urban environment. We don’t know how to hunt. My dad did it when he was younger, but he now lives far away from any familiar hunting grounds and doesn’t feel comfortable teaching us. Perhaps hunting would get better press if it did some outreach the way that small family farming has done with farmers’ markets and CSA programs. Invite people to come and learn about it! Linking up people who know how to hunt and those who want to learn would be great. We don’t all have the family backgrounds to find someone easily. Why doesn’t the NRA, with its considerable publicity machine and ostensible interest in protecting the rights of hunters, promote try to teach people how to hunt responsibly? I love how this posting ties together locavore movement and hunting, but people won’t change unless they can envision how to do it.

But after reading the other commenters’ responses to his comment, I guess he could have been ranting, thinking this was a post against hunters.