Hunters kill with less cruelty

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: Two kinds of gun control needed (Jim Taylor column, Feb. 20):

While Taylor tries to skirt around the edges of the typical anti-gun urbanite, his bias shows through clearly in his support of the Liberals’ new, wasteful and ineffective gun control measures. They have been panned by law enforcement and even a majority of media sees it as an attempt to portray the Liberals as getting tough on gun violence, when in reality they are simply pandering for urban anti-gun votes.

Taylor states that “he tries to sympathize to some extent” with legal gun owners and hunters. He can’t understand why anyone in modern society needs to hunt wild game for food and will “never understand how hunters can derive pleasure from killing.”

Almost all hunters derive pleasure from the many days spent on wilderness roads and trails. Those of us who are lucky to be successful, derive pleasure from the beautiful, natural, antibiotic and growth hormone-free meat that sustains us and our families.

A majority handle the responsibility of killing of an animal with serious reverence and take every effort to assure a clean, quick kill in which the animal doesn’t suffer needlessly. Most experience mixed sadness and elation at the same time after being successful. Animals taken by hunters generally experience less fear than domestic animals and fowl pushed to their death along the killing chutes in the slaughterhouses.

Andy Richards, Summerland