a bull is not vermin...honestly, i invite anyone to come out for a day on the hunt and see for yourself. Your see that the killing of the fox plays the smallest part in much bigger picture. Once discovered, fox hunting brings people in from all different walks of live with completely different interests. Horse riders/show jumpers, 4x4 enthusiasts, walkers, dog lovers, and lots and lots of port.

Your in the nitty gritty of the proper countryside and experiencing country life on a very personal basis.

The way i see it, a subject like this everybody is going to have varied views and opinions. The world would be such a boring place if we all agreed with eachother and liked the same things.

Following on from what Paddy said about bullfighting, i personally don't agree with grey hound racing... and i know alot of people will think thats silly but its my opinion

I have different views on hunting and killing for pleasure.
Hunting if done for the right reason and in the right way is fine.
For instance hunting rabbits/hare with birds of prey imo is a good way of
keeping down the numbers of both species which would other wise get out
of control in no time at all.Not only does it keep numbers down ,
but it also feeds the birds of prey with natural food and can put food on the table for the family.

Fishing is another form of hunting,
Sea fishing for food is fine,
Angling imo is needless and causes pain and distress to the fish caught on more than one occasion,as well as causing pain stress and in some cases
death to other water born animals such as swans.

Fox hunting although banned,still goes on only now the hunts take a bird of prey with them usually an Eagle to get around the ban.This type of hunting will always be an issue.Because of the way it is done.
You are either for it or against.

Bull fighting,Badger baiting ect are not forms of hunting.They are just killing
for the sake of money and so called entertainment.

The list and my veiws on them go on and on,but these are just a few.

There is a long history of birds of pray being taken along on the hunt, usually an eagle owl. this isn't to get around the ban tho...like I've said its not just about killing a fox. It's funny how this so called ban gets introduced and everyone thinks that that's the end of it. If you were to ask any pro fox hunter about the ban they are more than likely to say "what ban".

i just think hunters are evil. hunting for food is alright when there is nothing else but why are their lives any less valuable than yours? think about it! and culling is ok if desease is going to spread to other animals, but hunting for 'sport' is just wrong.I am trying to sign all anti - hunting petition under the sun, these murderers need to be stopped!!!!

My father was a hunter so I spent a lot of time living in the bush rain or shine. By learning the animals habits and way of life hunters are a lot more knowledgeable of behaviour than Joe Soap.
This means the hunter tend to make the best conservationists as they are more aware of something being out of place in the natural environment.

Anyone owning a hunting farm would never jeopardize an income through abuse or over culling and hunting.

Hey to get some real whacko’s opinion why not ask PETA?

I've no problem with it if the animals being hunted are vermin, or an area is overpopulated and needs a cull, so long as it's done sensibly and humanely...

Hunters really need to take into account the evolutionary changes we could be causing though, and take steps to minimise those. These are a couple of "classic" examples I can think of where we've inadvertantly altered a species by the way in which we hunt it:


1. Silent Rattlesnakes. In parts of the US, rattlesnakes are routinely hunted down and killed, primarily through ignorance / misunderstanding. Because of the habitat they live in, one of the best ways to track them is to listen for the rattle as you get close. This presents a problem though, as some rattlesnakes don't rattle as much as others, and you have to be pretty much on top of them before they make a sound. These ones generally aren't found.

If you only kill the noisy snakes, then more "silent" ones survive to reproduce, and to pass on the genes that they carry which encode for "silent" behaviour. Over the course of a few generations, the rattlesnake population becomes less inclined to rattle to warn people away. If someone is out hiking and they hear a rattle, generally they'll give it a very wide berth, to avoid being bitten. If they don't hear a rattle, they could get right up to the snake and risk being bitten. In rattlesnakes, a silent population is generally a more dangerous one, as there's no warning to stay away.


2. Tuskless Elephants. In a similar way to the rattlesnakes, in the 20th century elephants were selectively hunted, both for trophies and for ivory. For both of these, having large, impressive tusks is desirable, so elephants which had large tusks tended to be hunted first, and removed from a breeding population. As a result, only elephants with genes encoding for small tusk (or in some populations, no tusks) survived to breed, so their offspring predominantly had very small tusks. Again, over a few generations smaller tusks became the norm. A lot of African elephant populations show very small tusks, because of the impacts that hunting 50-100 years ago had on the population!


It's not too dissimilar with some fish species - in particular some commercially-fished marine species are under immense selective pressure to mature earlier and at a smaller size, so that they can reproduce before they are caught. This has the effect of dwarfing the species, as well as reducing their reproductive potential. When that particular fishery eventually collapses (and it will do), the survivors tend to be small, with a reduced ability to recover. Whereas the former population had larger individuals which could reproduce at a much faster rate (and thus help the population to regrow quickly), the individuals left after intensive fishing tend to be smaller, so recovery is inhibited.



In order to minimise the impacts that our hunting has on animal evolution, we need to either randomly select animals to hunt, or we need to hunt animals which are more likely to die anyway (genetically weak animals, older animals etc). This way we don't just remove individuals which have "desirable" (to humans) genes from the genepool.


In that sense, canned hunting is perhaps "better" - it's more tightly controlled, there is the possibility to introduce CB animals into it (minimising the impact on wild population), or to pre-select animals (if they're WC) which won't have such an impact on the genetic future of the species, or to preselect animals from an area where there is an excess, and they need to be culled anyway. Certain areas only have a certain capacity of animals which they can cope with. If they get more predators than the area can support, it's likely to adversely affect prey numbers through overhunting. Once prey numbers crash, the predators will begin to starve. I don't know about you, but I'd rather a quick death by gunshot than being starved...?

Whether or not I agree with hunting is pretty irrelevant, as some people will always enjoy hunting. Assuming that some of those who enjoy hunting will go hunting, surely it's better to provide a facility for them to do so, but in a way which minimises the environmental and genetic costs to the animals...?

i hate them! it's just murder and if i get my hands on one of those scumbags he/she will be in intensive care by morning

but why hunt when there is no need? how would you like it if some weird pink ape came with a shiny metal thing and killed you for no reason at all?

I know this is an oldish thread, but I want to put my opinion in here. I have no problem with hunting as long as it's done humanely and for a good purpose (like food or keeping the population down). I praise people who hunt for food instead of buying it at a grocery store (and this is coming from a vegetarian)... because you know where it's coming from, and most of the time, the meat sold in grocery stores come from animals that are crammed in tiny cages where they can barely turn around and fed hormones to produce more milk/eggs. It's (in most cases) a lot better for your health to eat hunted animals than it is eating meat sold in grocery stores. Hunting for 'sport' or 'fun' is wrong.