Those of you that are in some way affected emotionally by shooting an animal, maybe take a moment to reflect on the rest of your lives, in a day-to-day sense. Consider the contents of your supermarket trolley, the fast food snacks, the packet of scratchings at the pub... definitely the kebab on the way home after a few jars.
Its been an interesting thread. I watch some programs where people are overcome by their emotions after shooting an elk or in the case of the recent Meateater episode, a caribou. In the moment that I watched the reaction of the shooter, I thought to myself "you didn't get that fat from eating a hunter gatherer diet mate".
I come back to the question that I asked the OP earlier, 99% of those that express some kind of regret with regards to killing a deer feel absolutely bugger all when it comes to cleaning a rat out of a trap.
And it is the exact same lack of emotional attachment to the rat that allows most normal people to buy stuff from the supermarket, "food" that is manufactured using animal ingredients sourced from all sorts of highly questionable agricultural and manufacturing practices. It does feel a little bit sanctimonious or even hypocritical to make a show of being respectful to the prey animal that you just shot, when after a long day on the hill you call in at the service station and buy a cheap pie or Wimpy burger.
Because at the end of the day if the animal is not in your crosshairs, for the most part you are not even thinking about what's in your meal. The few of you on here that supply animals into the meat trade know what I mean, where you live the rules and regulations that govern farm animal welfare are light years ahead of the countries where much of what goes into what you buy in Sainsburys is actually produced. Yet a UK abattoir is still not a nice place for an animal to meet its end.
It is an interesting exercise bringing up a young sons in today's world, where everything we do is seemingly overcast by a determined effort by a "politically correct" minority to question our ethics, our very moral fibre, to change us into some kind of monosexual hypernice opinionless clone. Our primary objective as parents is not to cynically rail against the reality of modern society, creating two little bigots in the image of the numerous pathetic white male, lower middle class bigots we already have enough of in our society, thank you very much.
Educating our sons where their food comes from and how it is produced is an essential element of what we do as a family. We are lucky in that we produce all our own meat products, but then again we worked hard to be able to enable that. When we step outside our self-imposed rules, willfully breaking them, there's always a discussion. And a guilt trip like it or not!
Whether we shoot a meat animal, a pest animal, trap vermin or selectively euthanise animals for not meeting a standard, we try our best to do it right. The young fellas were understandably affected by it at first, culling young goats in particular. But they know why we do it. There's no drama, no tears, no reluctance or sadness. Its just a fact of life. The deer are edible, they need controlling, we like eating them, we have a means of converting them into food. Easy.
Do we enjoy the killing part? Its a non-issue. Just one small step in a long process, from the rain and sun making the grass grow, to the creation of protein from vegetable matter, to the application of heat to meat to produce the perfect meal. If you don't "like" the killing part, take a moment to reflect on all the other people you have paid to do it on your behalf, for example through the £9.99 you just spent at Waitrose on that microwave ready Chicken Kiev.