Global Sports: This Is Why My Hunting T-Shirts Are Important

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

This Is Why My Hunting T-Shirts Are Important

By Jason Thatcher


It almost seem like you can't get on the Internet these days without finding someone who is complaining about hunting, guns, or the abuse of animals. These people make accusations against hunters without really knowing anything about us or what we do. Everything they know about hunting, they learned from Disney movies. We are not the scary villains that kill the baby deer's mom. We are hunters who obey time-honored laws and traditions. We eat what we kill. We teach our children to honor nature. I wear my hunting t-shirts to remind me of all of these things.

Humans are hunters. Did you know that human beings are some of the greatest distance runners on the planet? We are built to track, hunt, and run down prey to the point of exhaustion. Our ancestors would run for days until an animal died from over exertion, and then we would rebuild our own tired, sore muscles from the protein their meat provides. We would not be here today if we had not developed those skills, and we certainly wouldn't have the most advanced brains in the world today. My hunting t-shirts are a symbol of my pride in our species.

Hunters love nature and everything she offers more than the average citizen of earth. Hunters appreciate what is given freely and are taught to only take what they can use. The average hunter looks at what careless people in cities do to the world and feel a pang of guilt for what their fellow humans are doing. When I enter the forest to hunt, I am overcome by the beauty of it and how grateful I am for everything God has given to us. The way we have squandered that gift breaks my heart. I wear hunting t-shirts to mourn for the loss of the wild.

Another thing that people don't understand is the prodigious rate in which deer and elk breed. If their populations are net kept in strict control, they would be encroaching into towns and starving to death during the harsh winters. Where once there were many natural predators keeping the populations down, those natural enemies are now dwindled in numbers. If we did not hunt, the fate of all deer would be much grimmer. I wear these hunting t-shirts because I understand how nature works.

We cannot all be hunters. Not any longer, anyway. There are far too many human beings in the world for us all to pick up a rifle and kill a deer. What you can do, as a responsible human being, is to leave the people who do hunt alone. We are not the monsters you think we are. We have learned how to take from the land only what it is able to give us, and we consume everything we take. Hunters are not bad people, and perhaps you should wear hunting t-shirts to remind you...just in case you forget.




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