Hunting Quotes

I'd rather get my brains blown out in the wild than wait in terror at the slaughterhouse.

Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.

I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.

When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature who was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted...If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

No, I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken?

The true trophy hunter is a self-disciplined perfectionist seeking a single animal, the ancient patriarch well past his prime that is often an outcast from his own kind... If successful, he will enshrine the trophy in a place of honor. This is a more noble and fitting end than dying on some lost and lonely ledge where the scavengers will pick his bones, and his magnificent horns will weather away and be lost forever.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself... There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

The emotions that good hunters need to cultivate are love and service more than courage. The sentiments of the hunt then become translated into art.

If some animals are good at hunting and others are suitable for hunting, then the Gods must clearly smile on hunting.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.

All the sounds of this valley run together into one great echo, a song that is sung by all the spirits of this valley. Only a hunter hears it.

There is a solitude, or perhaps a solemnity, in the few hours that precede the dawn of day which is unlike that of any others in the twenty-four, and which I cannot explain or account for. Thoughts come to me at this time that I never have at any other.

The wild life of today is not ours to do with as we please. The original stock was given to us in trust for the benefit both of the present and the future. We must render an accounting of this trust to those who come after us.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.

The pleasure of the sportsman in the chase is measured by the intelligence of the game and its capacity to elude pursuit and in the labor involved in the capture.

The land comes alive through its wild creatures.

Hunting has opened the earth to me and let me sense the rhythms and hierarchies of nature.

Unless a man has considerable skill with and reliance in his weapon, he will not remain cool in the presence of dangerous game close by.

I don't regard nature as a spectator sport.

In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.

If there is a sacred moment in the ethical pursuit of game, it is the moment you release the arrow or touch off the fatal shot.

I kill when I hunt and do not apologize for that, although I reserve the right to think about its implications. I also hunt without killing- whether by accident or design-and I do not apologize for that either. There is room in longbow country for a spectrum of tastes and attitudes, and that is as it should be.

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.