How can you love something that you kill?

I was walking back down the trail as brilliant orange and red leaves fell softly around me when a flash of bright auburn crawled across the midsection of a nearby  oak tree. I turned and saw a fox squirrel spread across it, looking down at the acorns at the base of his tree. In a second I drew my longbow back and shot forth an arrow at the little critter, only a few inches away from him, the bark exploded in shards and the little guy ran off. I chuckled, collected my arrow, and continued my hunt. I was looking for any game, small or big. I love nature, all the creatures and plants, yet I routinely try to kill them. 

This is a belief system that I believe more and more people don’t understand. The knee-jerk reaction to these ideas is to brandish them as hypocritical and they do not make sense. I mean, after all, to love something is to want it to last. 

The love I hold for the animals I hunt is a complex feeling, and sometimes as a hunter I feel my love for animals and nature outweighs those who don’t practice hunting. As the love I, and other hunters hold, is based on the reliance we have on nature. The food we provide for our families and neighbors relies on the land we own, and the land owned by the public. This develops a feeling or protectiveness and a hate for anything that threatens that land, as anything that damages nature literally takes food off of the plates of the people we hunters provide for. Food that we can source, and not something that comes from a far off factory. 

Hunters find themselves often in the woods, always monitoring the populaces of the land making sure it thrives. I remember lessons about watching for deer with Chronic Wasting Disease, animals with Rabies or even skunks with the Bubonic Plague. That it is our duty as hunters to remove these creatures, to stop the spread of the disease, and help preserve the habitats and species we care for. 

The role of hunters is very important to any environment humans inhabit, and the love hunters have for the environments they patrol is undeniable; though it is often under fire from those who don’t understand.

As a student at Northern Michigan University, I wish that more students understood this, that more students had the opportunity to go out to hunt and understand these nearly forgotten lessons.