An outbreak of a rare parasitic disease has been linked to undercooked bear meat eaten by dozens of people at a gathering in North Carolina, a new U.S. CDC report has revealed.
If you’re going to hunt a predator, and it’s not for sanctioned wildlife management culls, get a Bowie knife and have at it. Otherwise, I hope you suffer a horrible death.
I’m not anti-hunting, at all. Hunting is easily the most humane way to eat meat. But hunting predators is a sport, not subsistence.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who hunts predators for sport, is a gigantic asshole and you should not feel bad about wishing them harm. I would take that statement even further, but I don’t want the mods to remove this comment.
To be clear, no one likes bear meat, they’re opportunistic scavengers. These bears were hunted for sport most likely, but the hunters were slightly better than your average bear hunting asshole, and at least didn’t waste the meat. Most likely because it would be a wasted kill, and illegal.
They do. Texas allows ariel hunting of hogs, there’s no season, and no tag limit. I know lots of other areas have similar approaches of differentiating hunting laws and seasons when it comes to invasive species.
All the hunters I’ve known, have been an outdoor guys and nature conservationists, but also conservative usually.
I think they still have legal requirements about wanton waste, or at least best effort.
The no tag limit makes sense though, as they’re an incredibly invasive species and the aspirational goal is removal.
None of this should be considered legal advice, I could be mistaken on the regulations. You should check them out yourself to make sure I’m not full of shit, or confused.
The difference is that feral hogs are just that feral. They aint native and are an active harm to the environment, while the incentives may be perverse they would also be decently more effective than what we have right now.
The point of “perverse incentives” is that the plan doesn’t create a solution at all and isn’t remotely effective because it can can lead to things like some dude catching young females and throwing them in an enclosure with a male, letting them go once they’re pregnant, actively kill off the produced males, and repeat with the females.
If you tell a city to bring in dead rats for a reward, someone is going to start breeding rats in his basement.
Edit:
To make it clear, I’m for no tag limit, but I worry about rewards. Let the sadists go wild with blood. :p Not that I think hunters are sadists, it just takes a different kind of person to massacre on a scale like that.
Fair enough but such systems have worked in the past, the Aussies put a bounty on emu after the Emu war which worked out quite fine. Maybe mandate that that blood samples and location of kill must be turned in as well that way the department of fish and wild life can do some checking on things. I feel the bounty system could be implemented pretty easily, actually just make it so only hunters with a specific license can get the bounties with regular property check ups.
The California Grizzly was hunted to extinction for a number of reasons, but among them was that it was said to be delicious. Black bears aren’t really meat scavengers - they eat a lot of insects, berries, and some foliage. Actually pretty similar to the diet of a chicken. Tuna eat more meat than bears.
While the most common vector in the U.S. is now bear meat, that wasn’t always the case. The most common human infection vector used to be undercooked pork!
Many older folks won’t touch pork unless it’s well done, because apparently these parasites make your muscles feel like they’re on fire.
A history teacher (many years ago) even told my class that trichnosis was the reason Jewish people don’t eat pork. (A quick internet search throws water on that. Doesn’t rule it out, but it’s not guaranteed to be correct, either.)
While I agree that hunting apex predators (or, really, any sport hunting) is kind of dumb, I do want to note that pigs famously eat slop and bathe in their own shit and bacon is delicious. Which is to say, we probably can’t assume taste based on diet/lifestyle
I’m not anti-hunting, at all. Hunting is easily the most humane way to eat meat.
Ironically, hunting deer is now necessary here in Indiana because people hunted all the bears and wolves to extinction and now the deer population explodes and they all starve to death if hunters don’t keep the population in check.
There is a certain case I advocate bear hunting: bears that gain a proclivity for human environments or for humans as prey. It’s rare, though, and can (and should) be handled by wildlife management personnel whenever reasonable.
There’s prey animals, like deer. Those are hunted for subsistence, to eat and use.
Predators do not taste good, they taste bad in fact. They are not hunted for subsistence to feed your family, they’re hunted for sport. They are killed for fun, so assholes can stuff them and mount their heads on walls.
So yeah, there’s a difference. Either you yourself, like to hunt predators for sport, or you have no experience with, or knowledge of, hunting at all. Either way, your take is awful.
I agree with you about bear meat. I’ve had it once in my life and I enjoyed it. My cousin, the dude who killed it, didn’t make a trophy out of it. He used everything that could be used.
Would I kill a bear? No. But do I think limited hunting is evil? Also no. I’m not for wholesale slaughter of bears, that’s for sure.
I never even seen a bear in Appalachia during my childhood, not one. Good hunting laws have made it so I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen in my adult life. They’re everywhere, including carrying trash bags out of my cans.
Same, my dad is a hunter and I believe the person above is confusing trophy hunters with just hunters. While my dad hunts, I don’t believe I could do the same. It’s just not in me, but I have all due respect for them. Many revere nature, love animals, and hunting is an ancestral activity that pre-dates history.
Some hunters are dicks. But that doesn’t mean hunting predators is a dick move. You can hunt bears responsibly, using the meat and the rest.
It’s really weird to think that predator meat is somehow different from prey meat. Food all boils down to chemistry and it all ends up the same after digestion. The only difference is the microbes involved in the process, but those don’t carry on into the meat. Only prions and parasites pass into the meat, and that happens basically no matter where you are on the food chain.
Holy shit I was thinking about it and decided to google. Just wanted to come back and share this with you. There were around 400 bears in the state of West Virginia 40 years ago. I said I never seen them as a kid but I see them constantly now. Well, today the population is around 14,000. That’s crazy.
Sounds like there were conversation laws put in place at some point. Those laws do a great job at allowing nature to rebalance populations when people go too far with hunting.
that is a different discussion than “Predators aren’t hunted for food.” And a point I would generally not disagree with. For the vast majority of humanity; hunting is not necessary.
That doesn’t, however, invalidate history- Bears in particular have always been hunted by humans. Specifically for food, and yes their fur. Historically nothing would have been wasted, with everything being used for something- including making tools (Bones, for example, carved into knives or needles, or other tools.)
So your argument is that it’s wasteful? And that food is a better justification for the waste than making a trophy?
You can make trophies out of things that aren’t bears and you can eat things that aren’t deer, so I’m not sure how they are much different unless your argument is that eating specifically deer is important somehow and making trophies out of bears is not.
People who hunt prey for trophies, and waste the meat, are also pieces of shit. It’s called wanton waste, and it’s illegal.
But no one hunts predators for their meat. They hunt them for sport. They hunt them because they get a joy from killing them, and for no other reason. I’m not sure what you’re not getting about this. They only keep the meat, because again, it’s wanton waste and it’s illegal.
Bear meat is disgusting. Predators do not taste good. They’re killed so weak men can feel strong. They hunt predators because they enjoy killing for the sake of killing, and for trophies. That’s it.
This is the third time I rearticulated the same point, which everyone else here seems to get.
Now that I’ve done that for you, can you please let me know which one of these you are:
A. Someone who hunts predators.
B. Someone who has no experience with, or knowledge of, hunting.
Everything you say is based on convention and nature and opinion. You never addressed what I said and in your own words “rearticulated” (more like regurgitated) the same points that you have yet to give merit to.
You mean you don’t find merit in them. But I’m done, because at least I tried to answer your questions. Where you made no attempt at answering the one question I’ve asked you twice.
That’s because your question doesn’t progress any argument. Unlike the question I asked you which was meant to probe your reasoning. it’s the kind of thing a troll would ask. It’s also a false dichotomy. I’m perfectly fine with you discontinuing as I frankly didn’t expect to get a reply that continued the discussion in good faith after your first reply.
It doesn’t progress your argument. You do not come across as the one arguing in good faith here, just so you know. You should think about why, if you are.
I’m glad you love animals and I’m curious if you’re approaching this from a post-speciesist perspective? (e.g. perhaps you’re vegan for ethical and/or other reasons)
I know the term speciesism but am not read up enough about it to say whether I would fit that perspective. Personally I don’t believe a human and a bear and a deer are equal, or even two humans are equal, just equal in certain ways that matter when discussing things like the right to their life.
And taking a life can be justified. But I personally would not take a life for food as there are other things to eat. Even if OP believes that neither deer nor bears have the right to life though, I’m curious what line of reasoning would bring someone to think the act of taking one’s life is monstrous and taking another’s noble. Surely to believe such a thing there must at least be some kind of great cost attributed to at the very least killing that bear, and I am curious why that cost would not be also an attribute of killing the deer or be neutralized by the boon of deer meat vs a trophy or the satisfaction of hunting (which the OP claims to be the only reasons someone would hunt a predator, but I can come up with more).
The morality of the situation is certainly an emotional subject for me. But in conversations like these I’m mostly approaching it out of curiosity as I acknowledge that most people find these things normal and am more interested about why they find these things normal or what justifications they come up with on the spot. I believe most people don’t really know why they find these things normal, I’m not sure I really knew why I found them normal before I was myself questioned.
Fuck anyone who hunts bears.
There is a natural order to prey and predators.
If you’re going to hunt a predator, and it’s not for sanctioned wildlife management culls, get a Bowie knife and have at it. Otherwise, I hope you suffer a horrible death.
I’m not anti-hunting, at all. Hunting is easily the most humane way to eat meat. But hunting predators is a sport, not subsistence.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who hunts predators for sport, is a gigantic asshole and you should not feel bad about wishing them harm. I would take that statement even further, but I don’t want the mods to remove this comment.
To be clear, no one likes bear meat, they’re opportunistic scavengers. These bears were hunted for sport most likely, but the hunters were slightly better than your average bear hunting asshole, and at least didn’t waste the meat. Most likely because it would be a wasted kill, and illegal.
I wish gun owners would advocate more for hunting invasive species, like in the US there’s too many feral hogs and nutria.
They do. Texas allows ariel hunting of hogs, there’s no season, and no tag limit. I know lots of other areas have similar approaches of differentiating hunting laws and seasons when it comes to invasive species.
All the hunters I’ve known, have been an outdoor guys and nature conservationists, but also conservative usually.
No tag limit? That’s too far. I think the limit should be…say…30 to 50 feral hogs.
You should come and see how many and how invasive they really are.
Psst…he was making reference to a meme (see other reply for screenshot).
I think they still have legal requirements about wanton waste, or at least best effort.
The no tag limit makes sense though, as they’re an incredibly invasive species and the aspirational goal is removal.
None of this should be considered legal advice, I could be mistaken on the regulations. You should check them out yourself to make sure I’m not full of shit, or confused.
Great podcast episode on it from Reply All
tagging in case you didn’t catch the reference
@circuscritic@lemmy.ca @Gerudo@lemm.ee
Seems like not everybody got the reference.
We need to do a complete extermination of the feral hog population, not only should it be no tag limit there should be a bounty on them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
The difference is that feral hogs are just that feral. They aint native and are an active harm to the environment, while the incentives may be perverse they would also be decently more effective than what we have right now.
The point of “perverse incentives” is that the plan doesn’t create a solution at all and isn’t remotely effective because it can can lead to things like some dude catching young females and throwing them in an enclosure with a male, letting them go once they’re pregnant, actively kill off the produced males, and repeat with the females.
If you tell a city to bring in dead rats for a reward, someone is going to start breeding rats in his basement.
Edit:
To make it clear, I’m for no tag limit, but I worry about rewards. Let the sadists go wild with blood. :p Not that I think hunters are sadists, it just takes a different kind of person to massacre on a scale like that.
Fair enough but such systems have worked in the past, the Aussies put a bounty on emu after the Emu war which worked out quite fine. Maybe mandate that that blood samples and location of kill must be turned in as well that way the department of fish and wild life can do some checking on things. I feel the bounty system could be implemented pretty easily, actually just make it so only hunters with a specific license can get the bounties with regular property check ups.
I got it, even if nobody else did.
And how is a mermaid supposed to do that?
You drop the mermaids onto the hogs from the air; Surf 'n Turf.
Most gun owners that I know are not hunters. I’d like to change their perspectives and get them outdoors.
The California Grizzly was hunted to extinction for a number of reasons, but among them was that it was said to be delicious. Black bears aren’t really meat scavengers - they eat a lot of insects, berries, and some foliage. Actually pretty similar to the diet of a chicken. Tuna eat more meat than bears.
I thought this disease sounded familiar. Trichinosis - Wikipedia
While the most common vector in the U.S. is now bear meat, that wasn’t always the case. The most common human infection vector used to be undercooked pork!
Many older folks won’t touch pork unless it’s well done, because apparently these parasites make your muscles feel like they’re on fire.
A history teacher (many years ago) even told my class that trichnosis was the reason Jewish people don’t eat pork. (A quick internet search throws water on that. Doesn’t rule it out, but it’s not guaranteed to be correct, either.)
While I agree that hunting apex predators (or, really, any sport hunting) is kind of dumb, I do want to note that pigs famously eat slop and bathe in their own shit and bacon is delicious. Which is to say, we probably can’t assume taste based on diet/lifestyle
Yep, my grandmother went through the Great Depression and didn’t eat pork unless it was well done. For example, bacon had to be crispy.
Turns out trichinosis can kill children, and not silently in their sleep.
These days, commercial pork is highly regulated and safer to the point you only have to be cautious with smaller ranches.
Unpasteurized milk has a similar story, but my grandmother swore drinking that as a child was why she never had osteoporosis.
Me? It’s 2024, most food lacks nutritional value, so I cook everything to temp and take supplements
Ironically, hunting deer is now necessary here in Indiana because people hunted all the bears and wolves to extinction and now the deer population explodes and they all starve to death if hunters don’t keep the population in check.
There is a certain case I advocate bear hunting: bears that gain a proclivity for human environments or for humans as prey. It’s rare, though, and can (and should) be handled by wildlife management personnel whenever reasonable.
Yes, I specifically excluded sanctioned/lawful wildlife management practices.
Unfortunately you’ll see this a lot with polar bears, which is one of the reasons why proper waste management is so critical in Arctic towns/villages.
Poor waste management practices are capable of attracting more than just polar bears, but they are the most dangerous, for a host of reasons.
What a fucking weird take. Hunting is fine but only some animals. Something about the natural order yadayada.
There’s prey animals, like deer. Those are hunted for subsistence, to eat and use.
Predators do not taste good, they taste bad in fact. They are not hunted for subsistence to feed your family, they’re hunted for sport. They are killed for fun, so assholes can stuff them and mount their heads on walls.
So yeah, there’s a difference. Either you yourself, like to hunt predators for sport, or you have no experience with, or knowledge of, hunting at all. Either way, your take is awful.
I ate bear meat once and it was delicious.
I’m also looking forward to a nice tuna melt sandwich.
Your take is retarded.
I agree with you about bear meat. I’ve had it once in my life and I enjoyed it. My cousin, the dude who killed it, didn’t make a trophy out of it. He used everything that could be used.
Would I kill a bear? No. But do I think limited hunting is evil? Also no. I’m not for wholesale slaughter of bears, that’s for sure.
I never even seen a bear in Appalachia during my childhood, not one. Good hunting laws have made it so I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen in my adult life. They’re everywhere, including carrying trash bags out of my cans.
Same, my dad is a hunter and I believe the person above is confusing trophy hunters with just hunters. While my dad hunts, I don’t believe I could do the same. It’s just not in me, but I have all due respect for them. Many revere nature, love animals, and hunting is an ancestral activity that pre-dates history.
Some hunters are dicks. But that doesn’t mean hunting predators is a dick move. You can hunt bears responsibly, using the meat and the rest.
It’s really weird to think that predator meat is somehow different from prey meat. Food all boils down to chemistry and it all ends up the same after digestion. The only difference is the microbes involved in the process, but those don’t carry on into the meat. Only prions and parasites pass into the meat, and that happens basically no matter where you are on the food chain.
Holy shit I was thinking about it and decided to google. Just wanted to come back and share this with you. There were around 400 bears in the state of West Virginia 40 years ago. I said I never seen them as a kid but I see them constantly now. Well, today the population is around 14,000. That’s crazy.
Sounds like there were conversation laws put in place at some point. Those laws do a great job at allowing nature to rebalance populations when people go too far with hunting.
Bro.
Bears have been hunted since before human history. Specifically for their meat and fur. They’re delicious. And warm and fuzzy.
And none of it is needed right now any more. It’s just for sports.
that is a different discussion than “Predators aren’t hunted for food.” And a point I would generally not disagree with. For the vast majority of humanity; hunting is not necessary.
That doesn’t, however, invalidate history- Bears in particular have always been hunted by humans. Specifically for food, and yes their fur. Historically nothing would have been wasted, with everything being used for something- including making tools (Bones, for example, carved into knives or needles, or other tools.)
So your argument is that it’s wasteful? And that food is a better justification for the waste than making a trophy?
You can make trophies out of things that aren’t bears and you can eat things that aren’t deer, so I’m not sure how they are much different unless your argument is that eating specifically deer is important somehow and making trophies out of bears is not.
People who hunt prey for trophies, and waste the meat, are also pieces of shit. It’s called wanton waste, and it’s illegal.
But no one hunts predators for their meat. They hunt them for sport. They hunt them because they get a joy from killing them, and for no other reason. I’m not sure what you’re not getting about this. They only keep the meat, because again, it’s wanton waste and it’s illegal.
Bear meat is disgusting. Predators do not taste good. They’re killed so weak men can feel strong. They hunt predators because they enjoy killing for the sake of killing, and for trophies. That’s it.
This is the third time I rearticulated the same point, which everyone else here seems to get.
Now that I’ve done that for you, can you please let me know which one of these you are:
I love bear meat, and cougar. I don’t know where you got this idea that predators don’t taste good.
I’ve eaten a few cougars in my time and gotta say, taste varies wildly depending on lifestyle and hygiene.
From eating them and growing up in an area with a lot of subsistence, and sports, hunting.
Then maybe you should grow up next to someone that can cook next time
Everything you say is based on convention and nature and opinion. You never addressed what I said and in your own words “rearticulated” (more like regurgitated) the same points that you have yet to give merit to.
You mean you don’t find merit in them. But I’m done, because at least I tried to answer your questions. Where you made no attempt at answering the one question I’ve asked you twice.
Which itself is answer enough.
That’s because your question doesn’t progress any argument. Unlike the question I asked you which was meant to probe your reasoning. it’s the kind of thing a troll would ask. It’s also a false dichotomy. I’m perfectly fine with you discontinuing as I frankly didn’t expect to get a reply that continued the discussion in good faith after your first reply.
It doesn’t progress your argument. You do not come across as the one arguing in good faith here, just so you know. You should think about why, if you are.
I’m glad you love animals and I’m curious if you’re approaching this from a post-speciesist perspective? (e.g. perhaps you’re vegan for ethical and/or other reasons)
(not arguing anything btw just curious)
I know the term speciesism but am not read up enough about it to say whether I would fit that perspective. Personally I don’t believe a human and a bear and a deer are equal, or even two humans are equal, just equal in certain ways that matter when discussing things like the right to their life.
And taking a life can be justified. But I personally would not take a life for food as there are other things to eat. Even if OP believes that neither deer nor bears have the right to life though, I’m curious what line of reasoning would bring someone to think the act of taking one’s life is monstrous and taking another’s noble. Surely to believe such a thing there must at least be some kind of great cost attributed to at the very least killing that bear, and I am curious why that cost would not be also an attribute of killing the deer or be neutralized by the boon of deer meat vs a trophy or the satisfaction of hunting (which the OP claims to be the only reasons someone would hunt a predator, but I can come up with more).
The morality of the situation is certainly an emotional subject for me. But in conversations like these I’m mostly approaching it out of curiosity as I acknowledge that most people find these things normal and am more interested about why they find these things normal or what justifications they come up with on the spot. I believe most people don’t really know why they find these things normal, I’m not sure I really knew why I found them normal before I was myself questioned.
Humans can justify and rationalise anything, including dropping bombs on schools.
I’m not really sure what point you are trying to make.
Very interesting. Thanks for the detailed response!