Hunting is a way to spend time with my family and make new memories with them on every trip. It is a fun way to get out in the environment; it distracts from the everyday busy life we normally always live. When I was a little kid, my dad would come home from hunting and I would always want to go on the next trip with him. Learning about hunting at a young age encouraged my passion now.

From a young age, I never thought that I was harming the deer. Supposedly, there were benefits to hunting directly toward overpopulation. Diseases pass if there is overpopulation; deers also starve in the winter season. Deers get hit by cars because there is nowhere else for the deer to venture. Usually, deer get killed more by vehicles rather than people hunting deer. 

Local businesses make better money when it is hunting season due to the free meat lurking around; gun shops, restaurants, taxidermists and butchers are just a few. States gain tax money as well for hunting licenses because people acquire them for upcoming hunting seasons. These businesses get an immense amount of money when hunting season comes around; they utilize the meat for hunting or supply the people who hunt. 

With hunting, the animals are dying in a humane way. When shooting the animal, they are dying without suffering. If the animal were hit by a car or starved to death, they would suffer increasingly. Deer can also get Chronic wasting disease, which is also called “Zombie deer”  disease. When the deer get this disease, they lose weight, have behavioral changes, experience tremors and lose fear towards humans. This disease makes deer not even appear as deer by changing their whole personality, physically hurting them. 

This disease is a major problem in deer populations in Western states like Montana and Wyoming. I do not think people understand that hunting these animals is beneficial at the same time. There is no reason to 9

mental mindset about hunting from a young age has helped me grow to love it incredulously.  

People do not understand that hunting is a tradition for many families and creates joy for these people. I love spending time with my family when we are hunting all together; it hatches new memories and helps the environment at the same time. People who disagree with hunting will never understand the joy that comes from being with your family, as well as the benefits for the animals killed. 

People who are typically hunting view it as a sport, but then it is a sport based on killing animals for no reason. The idea of hunting being a sport turns into it becoming an unjustified competition. I never want to hurt an animal for any reason unless it is necessary for food purposes only. 

I do not hunt because I value putting kindness and empathy first for people and animals. Though no one in my family hunted, subconsciously, I knew it was a horrible thing to do to an animal. I am sure if there were people in my family who hunted, I might have felt different about it, but since there was no influence, I have always felt the same about it since I was a kid. 

Hunting is extremely cruel to animals; hunters kill for little to no reason. We live in a world today where we consume more meat than any other country in the world. We are consuming meat so fast, to the point where we have a higher growth rate of animals being consumed than of animals actually being born. If we continue this pattern, eventually there will be no real meat left, and it will have to become essentially lab-grown meat. 

Killing animals is completely unnecessary; there are plenty of other options in which nothing has to die. Hunting is viewed as a competition for most people. After a successful hunt, they will post on social media what they killed over the weekend. It should not be a competition with animals being their “prizes.” 

You take a life away when you are hunting; just because it is not a human life does not change what you are doing. Animals have pain receptors, and animals know what is happening to them. They can recognize different things in the environment; they can also develop memories, and hunting kills everything out of them. The act of hunting is something deeper than just killing the animal. I believe there is an emotional aspect to it, as well as thinking about the lifestyle of the person hunting and what they believe. 

Though I do not believe in killing an animal, I am not shaming people who love hunting. I do not view them differently as a person, but we will never agree on the small details of hunting, and we never will. There is a group of people who love hunting and will always hunt as an outdoorsy activity. However, there is also a group of people who will never understand how people kill animals for fun. 

Hunting will always be something that is unnecessary and cruel to me. Killing an animal is not supposed to be fun; killing an animal should never be something labeled “fun.” I believe hunters will never understand how cruel hunting is for the animal they are killing for self-enjoyment.