I consider myself a hunter, and I am quite proud of being one ... and many times I had to deal with more than one ignorant that gather us all in the same bag no matter which ethics we apply when hunting ... and as true hunters I think we must do our best to avoid these canned hunts practices go on ....

For me hunting is something I do just for myself, looking after a challenge which, at the end, me and only me will be both judge and jury - and thus decide whether it was an achievement that made my proud or miserable ...

Indeed one must kill in order to hunt, but not necessary must hunt in order to kill ... in my book, there is quite a difference between hunting and killing ... actually some of my best hunts have ended without a kill - that is when my occasional prey was better than myself ...

As Ortega y Gasset writes:

"To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death--that is, the hunt. Therefore, what was before only a means to an end is now an end in itself. Death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting: the killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and the goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter. The hunter seeks this death because it is no less than the sign of reality for the whole hunting process. To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted."

My own feeling regarding the act of hunting is trying to win to the infinitely better developed senses of the animals... and I will never question the form in which these senses are overcome, provided we are always dealing with wild animals with such senses upgraded to a superlative level of development and being in constant attention...

Here we are speaking of the pseudo "sport of killing of animals bred in captivity and released into enclosed surroundings with no chance of escape (...) which also includes the hunting of animals that plows drugged, sedated or accustomed to humans ".... obviously such animals don't have developed the instinct of survival nor would they associate humans to danger / risk of life ... thus when facing the occasional "shooter" they won't try to escape neither to make things somewhat more difficult to that shooter....

I think that the value of any trophy will be given mostly by the form in which the same one was obtained.... I prefer a good challenge given by mediocre level of measured trophy rather than a great "trophy" obtained just by shooting down a somehow domesticated animal...

I am the only who will determine the value of my own trophies, since me and me alone will really know about the effort and of the miseries or greatness that I had to carry in order to obtain it / them ... and just afterwards the hypothetical general acceptance will come in the form of the resulting points its measurement will give ...

If we don´t respect our preys we cannot respect ourselves as hunters ...

I do believe that the question we should ask ourselves is why we hunt ...

In order that our fellow men would admire the resulting trophies perhaps gotten in some doubtful or criticizable way?

Or to satisfy that personal yearning of accepting and thus trying to win as fair as possible the challenge offered by a smart animal in its best possible conditions?

I will always follow the second one !!!

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