24 Shoot to Kill Why We Hunt

CHAPTER 1 Hunting WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU THINK OF HUNTING? Meet Wayne Douglas. He is a hunter. He hunts deer every year during hunting season. After he kills deer, he cleans them. He and his family eat the deer meat all year. Maybe you think of someone like Wayne when you think of hunting. Paul and Sue Rogers are on vacation in Costa Rica. They catch a lot of fish, but they don't eat them. For them, fishing is fun. They fish for sport. Some people hunt animals for money. They kill them and sell parts of their bodies. Other people hunt animals, but they don't kill them. They study the animals to help people or to help the animals. Jeff Corwin, for example, captures animals and studies them. He gets information about them. Later, he uses this information to help the animals. People hunt for food, but they also hunt for other reasons. They hunt for sport. They hunt for fun. They hunt for money. They hunt to help people. And sometimes they hunt animals to help the animals. People have many reasons to hunt. They also have many opinions about hunting.

CHAPTER 2 Helping People An actress walks into a movie theater. She's wearing a fox coat. An angry person puts red paint on her. The person thinks it is wrong to wear fur. Many others have the same feelings. In the past, people used every part of an animal. We ate the meat and used the fur for clothes. Today, people use animal fur for coats, but we often do not use all of the animal. We capture and kill some wild animals only for their fur. Sometimes, we capture wild animals, but we do not kill them. We keep them as pets. Most people think that birds and cats are good pets. How about monkeys and tigers? Do they make good pets? Some people buy wild animals in pet stores. Other people get them from the wild, and they take them home. Sometimes, these animals are endangered. It is illegal in many places to have a wild animal for a pet. Why? First, because it is dangerous. Wild animals can attack people. Also, it is not good for the animal. Many wild animals get sick out of the wild.

People also capture wild animals to use them for medical research. One example is snakes. Researchers capture snakes and take their venom. Then they use the venom to make a drug. Doctors give this drug to people when a snake bites them. Years ago, many people died from snakebites. In the US today, only about five people die from snakebites every year. Medical research helped make snakebites less dangerous. Medical research uses animals, and those animals sometimes get sick or die. For this reason, some people think medical research is cruel. Today, researchers mostly use mice over 25,000,000 (25 million) mice every year! Hunting helps people in other ways. A farmer in Texas has a problem: wild hogs. These animals are killing his farm animals. They are eating his food. He is worried they are going to attack his children. He calls Jerry Campbell. Jerry and his family are hog hunters. They hunt wild hogs to protect people. Hunters sometimes kill dangerous animals when they get too close to people. In Texas, there are about one million wild hogs. They live very close to people. Farmers lose about $50 million a year because of the hogs. Hunters kill the hogs to help the farmers.

CHAPTER 3 Helping Animals DOES HUNTING HELP ANIMALS? Can hunting be good for animals? Yes, it can! Hunting can help animals in many ways. With no hunting, some groups of animals get too big. This is a problem for all of the animals in the group. Take deer, for example. In some places, there are too many deer. There is not enough food for all of the deer. They are hungry. Many deer die slowly and painfully. Others leave their homes to find food. They go into cities where cars hit and kill them. Hunters kill some of the deer to stop the number of animals from getting too big. Many people feel it is less cruel for the deer to die like this. Marcos and Carol are whale hunters. They capture a whale, but they don't kill it. They put a small computer on the whale. It records what the whale does. It shows where the whale goes. Marcos and Carol learn about whales from the information. Then they try to help other whales. Many people hunt animals to study them. They do not kill the animals. They capture them and record information about them. This helps people understand the problems of a group of animals. Later, people use this information to help the animals.

Other people capture animals to relocate them. Karen Parsons lives in New Jersey. One day, she saw a bear in her yard. She was worried. She didn't want it to attack her or her children. She called an animal control centre. They captured the bear and took it back to its home. People often relocate an animal when it leaves its home and goes into a city. People at an animal control center take the animal back to its home. If this is not possible, they take it to a zoo. This protects people and the animal. Sometimes people relocate groups of animals. This can help endangered animals. For example, the Florida panther was endangered. These panthers only lived in one part of Florida in the United States. There were only about 100 of them living in the wild. People found safe places for the panthers to live in other parts of Florida and Georgia. They captured some of the panthers and relocated them to these places. There are going to be about 250 panthers in each new place in a few years.

CHAPTER 4 Poaching POACHING IS A PROBLEM IN MANY COUNTRIES. In many places, there are some times of the year when it is OK for people to hunt wild animals and some times when it is illegal. Poaching is hunting and killing wild animals when it is illegal. For example, in the United States there is a deer season. This is the time of year when it is OK, or legal, to hunt deer. It is illegal to hunt deer at other times. This protects the deer, but it also helps hunters. For example, it is illegal to hunt deer when babies are with their mothers. If a hunter kills the mother, the baby dies, too. So next year, there aren't so many deer, and that's not good for hunters. Poachers often kill endangered animals. Why? For money. Some people pay a lot of money for endangered animals— for example, $20,000 for the horns of a bighorn sheep. If poaching doesn't stop, some animals are going to disappear. In the early 1800s, there were over 1,500,000 bighorn sheep in North America. Today, there are fewer than 70,000. Some people think that poachers are not hunters. Hunters kill animals for good reasons, but poachers do not.