To The Tourists At Our Lovely Beach

The parents would just ‘claim’ their child has ADD or is autistic. What a bunch of bullshit. You should have lectured the parents and then thrown a bucket of honey-mixed with bird seed on the kid.

I took wildlife management many years ago in hopes of one day becoming a conservation officer or something…that didn’t work but regardless, I DID learn a few things.
I think there are a few unintentional, maybe uninformed? statements being tossed around here. Firstly, “killing animals for sport leads to extinction.” Not entirely true. While killing animals for the sake of killing them or outside of legal boundaries, (aka poaching) CAN and HAS lead to extinction, hunting, (which is considered a sport), done in a responsible manner, (which 99% of hunters are), is actually beneficial to a wildlife population. A habitat can only sustain so many numbers of animals. If a particular species is left to breed and expand with no way of keeping their population in check, then eventually, mother nature steps in and disease and starvation take affect, which greatly reduces said population. Example: White tailed deer. If they are left alone, they continue to breed and saturate their habitat with more and more deer. Soon, available food has been eaten up, sometimes to the decimation of the habitat itself, and the animals start dying off. If the population is managed responsibly, i.e. populations are monitored, studied and bag limits and hunting areas are designated based on this info, and the hunters themselves are monitored, i.e. hunting licenses, conservation officers, policing, hunter training courses…then this roller coaster affect of population boom and then resulting die-off doesn’t happen. This results in a much more healthy herd of deer, with plenty of food available. Plus, the hunter gets to experience the hunt itself and if he/she’s lucky, some meat for their table.
Second, ” He doesn’t need a lecture from all you high and mighties. He needs someone to give him a sling shot, and tell him to go get some rabbits for the stew pot.” While I agree that it’s important that children learn where our food comes from at an early age, and if that entails going hunting with mom or dad, than all the better, I DON’T agree with the statement in this particular case. Educating your kid on where our food comes from is only part of the lesson. You should also be teaching them respect for other living creatures and awareness of their environment. By allowing the kid to throw stones at birds, potentially injuring or killing them, just because it’s fun, is, IMO, wrong, and the parents should have been taken to task over it in this instance. However, if you were to take your kid hunting, teaching them outdoor skills, how to track and read the various signs of wildlife, to teach them the importance of a clean and humane kill without needless suffering and to foster an appreciation of nature and the environment, then, IMO, that is a valuable and well taught lesson that will probably stick with that kid for the rest of their lives. Example: when you first go deer hunting, you’re taught that if you have a clear shot and there was no chance of simply wounding the animal, then you take it, usually aiming for the heart, which results in a quick and humane death. You are NOT taught, to take pot shots, winging the deer in the flank and then maybe blowing off it’s antlers cuz you want to show off your marksmen skills, and then maybe a shot to the gut, letting it bleed out until it dies a slow, painful, agonizing death. That is inhumane and cruel. See the difference? If you teach the kid that there are consequences involved in killing another living creature and that there should be serious thought given before deciding to kill, not just randomly killing because it’s fun and you can, that should be the goal.
I do, however, agree totally with your statement about how, we as a society, (the Sobey’s hunters) are totally uneducated about where our food comes from. All we see is a slab of meat under cellophane in a styrofoam tray. No thought is given as to where this meat came from, how the animal was raised, cared for, fed, or slaughtered. Numerours reports on factory chicken farms have been made where the chickens are essentially, mutants, genetically altered and tweaked to yield the most meat possible, kept in cramped, filthy warehouses, stacked on top of one another and force fed a mixture of high fat feed and antibiotics. It’s fact. They’re out there and we eat this stuff. There was a show on BBC a few years back where a sustainable farmer and chef, would take average brits who, like so many of us, gave no thought as to where their food came from, and put them on his free-range farm for a month. There, they would have to do the standard farm chores but also learn how the food they buy in the grocery store ended up there. He would let them witness the humane slaughter and butchering of a free range sheep or chickens, for instance, and then harvest the veggies from his garden and then teach them to prepare a meal with this food. It was a real eye opener for so many people, including myself. Another show I watched followed a chef as he traveled around the world. One episode, he was in Italy staying with a family on their rural farm. They got him to participate in a boar hunt in which, the whole family took part, even the kids. After killing the boar, they would butcher it at their farm and the kids would witness all of this. Most of us would react in horror to allowing a child to see this but to them, it was normal. It was a valuable lesson for the child. This kid knew where their meal was coming from and had learned respect for animals at a very early age. Anyway, this is my 2 cents worth. If I had witnessed the kid throwing rocks at the birds and the parents laughing, I would have probably stepped in and said something.