I don't hunt, but I live in an area where a lot of people do. At the school I went to, the first day of deer hunting season was an unofficial holiday for half the males over 15 and for a few of the teachers as well. Because my parents were from a more urban area, deer hunting wasn't a tradition in my family, and so I never learned how to do it. My father and a couple of brothers had small game licenses, but I don't recall them using them very much.

My brother-in-law 2 of 12's husband is a big time deer hunter, and in recent years he has been getting at least one and more often two, so I get to eat venison every now and then. My landlord hunts as well and he gives me some ground meat to fry every year. I'm not totally fond of the taste, but I get certain sense of satisfaction out of eating something when I know the person who killed it, instead of having a featureless piece of meat from a store, totally removed from where it came from.

So anyway, one of the paralegals I work with is a hunter and we talked about it today as we took a one hundred mile trip. She grew up in a farming and hunting family that owned hunting camps in the mountains. She said that her father (a high school math teacher) had all eight of the children learning how to handle weapons before they were ten. She said she was the best shot in the family, and was the only girl in her class to skip school on the first day of deer season. "How'd you do on that test today?" her father asked. "I shot a six pointer", she said.

The brain uses ten times more calories per ounce than any other body part except the muscles when they are vigorously exercising. There is a theory that the increase in brain size in the human species came about because of hunting. The highly concentrated calories found in muscle and fatty tissue were needed to support that high energy consuming brain mass. In turn those brains provided an advantage in hunting. Our larger brains allowed us to anticipate the movement of prey and to coordinate attacks when hunting in groups. Of course, any theory like that is just part of a larger picture, because larger brains and greater communication skills would have conveyed a number of advantages.

Even though I myself am a bit too squeamish to enjoy it, I think that animal rights activists who protest hunting are a bit out of touch. There are those who feel that shooting deer is inhumane. But when deer populations get too high, they die by starvation. Is it better to starve to death or die with a bullet? And then there are others who say we should let the wolf population come back. But wolf packs don't kill anywhere as quickly as hunters do. They don't jump on their necks and bite their jugulars. They usually start with the hindquarters and work their way forward. And that is nothing to say about the hazard a pack of wolves can pose to young children.

I can understand a bit of the thinking: if a person learns to develop an indifference to the suffering of non-human life, it might be that much easier to develop an indifference towards human life. It is more complicated than that though. I don't think any study has shown that people who hunt are more likely to be murderers. Anymore than lifestock farmers are. I believe (and I could be wrong) that more murders occur in large urban areas, where people are less likely to have been exposed to hunting or raising livestock for food.

In recent years, as there have been less and less hunters, deer have become a significant hazard to traffic. I had a client who was disabled by a deer in the road. I myself ran into a doe last year and have almost run into another two this year. Early this spring one day I passed four deer along one stretch of highway that had been hit by traffic. That's four high speed accidents in one day caused by deer.

Frankly, I'd just rather have the hunters deal with the deer. It's a quick death, provides food for humans, and the hunters get a sense of pride from it.

All right. This probably sounded too preachy, but I just felt like writing and this is what was in there today.