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For millennia, man has needed to take down his fellow beasts to put food in his belly. Hunting is a survival instinct, a means of achieving the end of satisfying hunger. And while few human beings in our increasingly globalized, homogenized society feel little connection to the natural world, there is still intrinsic reasons of quality by which one would wish to hunt his own meat. With feedlot domestication replacing wild game as the protein staple in most diets, there is a need to maintain food chain diversity...

However, that in no way promotes hunting as sport. "Sport hunting" denotes a mentality that the animal is being killed as some sort of trophy rather than as a responsibly-harvested part of the dinner table. Bigger is better, body count is sacrosanct, and there is little if any respect for the animal which is giving his life to we humans. This behavior can be called many things, but it certainly cannot be qualified as SPORT.

Sport requires, by any common definition of the term, two competing sides. In the increasingly high-tech world that treats beast as bauble, only human error can prevent the victory of one side. Sport hunting is as much legitimate sport as the Washington Generals facing off futilely against the Harlem Globetrotters week in and week out.

One could obviously make the argument that the sport is not in the battle between predator and prey but rather between the hunters themselves, as each strives to surpass the feats of his contemporaries in a contest of oneupmanship. This, however, is not sport but merely the luck of the draw. All that is required to bag the biggest rack is to be at the correct place at the correct moment when the buck happens to be wandering by. There is a certain element of luck to sport... but to call this luck associative of the hunting experience comparable to the luck inherent in sports is to oversell the competitive aspect of hunting and to thereby cheapen the athletic competition of sport.

Hunting is many things to many people. Whether it is a desire to fill the family's freezer naturally for the year, the need for a warm hide on a cold winter evening, or some latent attempt to compensate for one's discrepancies elsewhere by bagging the prize trophy piece, there are legitimate reasons why the hunter goes into the woods to chase down his prey. However, to call any of these needs a sport in any legitimate definitional sense is to misunderstand the meaning of sport. Hunting is work; hunting is leisure; hunting is grocery shopping; hunting is a diversion; but alas, hunting is NOT sport...

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