Often it doesn’t work out, but the hunter enters the hunt believing it will.The term “sportsman” is often applied to hunters, fishermen, and trappers, but is that the correct moniker? Download Citation | Is Hunting a “Sport”? Hunting, sport that involves the seeking, pursuing, and killing of wild animals and birds, called game and game birds, primarily in modern times with firearms but also with bow and arrow. It’s a great thing that they have. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could recapture the day . Although there are many aspects of sport in hunting and fishing, the classification of hunting as a sport leaves much to be desired. The hunt is no sport; it is not diversion, but rather immersion that touches our primal roots. .” (Photo: Duane Rosenkranz/iStock)Hunters understand their responsibility to the fair-chase pursuit of game, responsibility to the resource and habitat, limiting take to what is sustainable, the requirement that they support wildlife and wild places with sweat and treasure to ensure it remains. Outdoor sport enthusiasts should be quick to explain that without the element of providing meat, hunting would have no justification whatsoever.In furtherance of this type of sporting view, organizations comprised of hunters have improved, conserved and saved large tracts of land that would otherwise have been lost to “progress.” Organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited and many others have set the highest bar for environmentalism. . The hunter, the fisherman, and the trapper do far more for conservation than any other segment of society.No, hunting was never a “sport.” And it’s not today.Hunting is not a “sport.” A cheating and dishonest player of sports is disagreeable; a cheating and dishonest hunter is corrupt.I think of winning and losing and opponents and competition, which are fine in athletics but sorry reasons for hunting.” .
It is an abiding mystery that, while a hunter may claim the life of the quarry, the animal is never seen as vanquished or defeated. These poor kids never get to play on their own, outside, where they might encounter an insect, bird, flower or deer.“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”Every year 50, 60, 70 hunters out of every 100 come home empty-handed. | This essay discusses the question of whether hunting is a competitive sport. I think not.If the quarry is taken, that animal becomes part of that hunter forever. This is a dangerous viewpoint that certainly puts hunting and fishing in a poor light. They have said so in their writings, if they wrote, or in their cave paintings if they did not. The animals we hunt are not opponents. As we sit by an animal we have killed and feel its body heat still within it, we feel humility and some sadness. By this reasoning, sport regulations have improved the hunting and fishing world and conservationism by leaps and bounds in the past 100 to 200 years. Those behaviors are for the end zone of the junior-high mentalities in the NFL.I think of an activity with little purpose except entertainment and diversion.All of the old ones, the ancient ones, felt the same power in it. If you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on the animal’s terrain, if you imprison in your mind all the wonder of the day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers—then you have not merely killed an animal. If true for you, then you are a hunter. Why? Our duty as hunters in this age of urbanization is to articulate the distinctions of our sport to non participants in a non offensive, convincing manner. Hunting is a sport because you need a ton of skill to be able to hold your body still to take the perfect shot. But is that what we are? Hunting has always been a sport beginning in prehistoric times. So, to more properly answer the question; Hunting is a sport when it’s done right, the same way baseball is a sport when it’s played according to the rules. Are we engaged in a sport? In Great Britain and western Europe, hunting is the term employed for the taking of wild animals with the aid of hounds that hunt by scent, whereas the sport of taking small game and game birds with a gun is known as shooting .