>>212391352I love shooting bows but I'll never understand the people who pretend like hunting with a modern compound bow and carbon arrows is somehow more in tune with nature or manlier or whatever. The compound bow was invented in the fucking 60s! A simple shotgun is genuinely older technology! They always bring up how you have to get closer to the animal so it's more sporting, but you can just fucking do that with a rifle! Just walk closer, bro! No one's forcing you to shoot animals from the maximum possible range!
Using those special decapitating arrows to hunt turkeys and similar fowl is neat in my book, though. Mostly because that's definitely a faster and less painful death than using a shotgun on them. Shooting smaller stuff for food because it's cheaper than shells is also fine in my book, just not big stuff like elk or fucking lions that have to slowly bleed to death while you try to follow its bloody trail for an hour because you want a trophy on your wall. The meat certainly doesn't taste better after you've stressed the animal out like that.
I ran into a similar asshole hunter culture thing when I researched local laws about culling rabbits with a silenced rifle. You can pick off way more of them grazing in a field with a silenced .22 because they don't scatter at the sound of the gunshot, so if you're actually looking for food or to cull an overpopulation that's eating all your shit then it's way more efficient. I found so fucking many hunters complaining about how it wasn't sporting and that to be truly sporting you had to use dogs to flush them out of hiding and let the dogs chase the rabbits around for a while so the dog felt good about itself before you shot the rabbit with your manly shotgun. Simply inane rules.