If your not, I think your remarks may border on the hypocritical.

My dad and I fished and my wife's family are hunters. Most of my friends are hunters. In fact, Rifle season in Washington just ended and no one I know got a deer this year. But their license fees still go to manage the resource.

Feeding their "Bloodlust" is not what it's about. It's a family tradition. They take one of their two weeks of vacation, get out in the wilderness and unwind from a heavy summer's workload.

To consume neatly packaged lumps of flesh from your supermarket conveniently removes your personal responsibility for the animal’s death and its treatment while it was alive.

When I witnessed what young cattle go through, I gave up hamburgers for a week. They herd them into a chute that clamps down tight and the whole cow is rotated 90 degrees. Then they take a scalpel and slit ‘that’ most tender of places until the family jewels drop out and are cut off and placed on the Bar-B-Que ("Barby" to you). Then they take what looks like a tree lopper but with a sharp ice cream scoop-like cutting device and scoop out the budding horns. Blood spurts out all over the place in 4' to 6' long streams until they pour the coagulant in the hole. All this is horrible but the worst is the branding. When the first steer is branded it literally screams. Its tongue fails wildly as It's eye's roll up in its head and its brothers start making the same sound in anticipation of their turn. "Well, that's the worst they go through", said the rancher trying to justify what he was doing to them. "That, and all the shots..."

My nephew is a dairy farmer and he has lots of blood curdling stories of what dairy cows go through but what stands out is how they deal with a breach birth:

1) Secure one end of the come-a-long (winch) to the barn roof support pole.

2) Secure the other to the calf.

3) Pray it doesn’t break the cow's pelvis.

And if you won’t to know what happens to chickens... go to PETA's site.

Try to think of all this next time you see a skilled hunter humanly drop an animal in its tracks and wonder what that hunk of meat went through to get to your dinner plate.

Taking life is not an easy thing. Here's a story I posted on Tech1's old website that you might find it amusing. 'Mongo the Warrior Chicken' (scroll down)

Oh, and BTW, for the majority of Americans...violence only exits on TV, most of us are pretty decent if I do say so myself.

RobVG