Hunting For an Answer

In his article, “Hunting- It’s Bad For Animals, It’s Bad For America,” Kelly Overton argues that hunting is a useless act, hunting is based on “our country’s racist past”, and hunting glorifies gun violence. As an individual who has been an active hunter since age ten and a member of the Texas Trophy Hunters Association, I will invalidate each of these claims. Overton failed to research the positive results caused by the practice of hunting before he deemed hunting a useless act. Overton states that hunting deer is “neither useful nor necessary.” Overton also says that “The animals are not invading our territory,” and on that point, he is correct. The growing human population is invading the animal’s territory. As many rural areas become suburban neighborhoods, the number of deer’s natural predators are declining so rapidly that the population of deer is growing out of control. As humans continue to inhabit rural areas in order to build houses, people are choosing to hunt deer in order to account for the lack of natural predators, which as a result of human expansion, are forced to relocate to a less populated area. If these deer populations were not managed properly they would grow exponentially in individual numbers, and eventually die a slow, painful death due to starvation. Thankfully, hunting is an undeniably effective method for keeping deer population under control in ever expanding suburban neighborhoods.
Overton later argues that hunting is a tradition based on racism but in reality, the practice of hunting has been around for 1.5 million years for the singular purpose of feeding communities. Overton argues that “hunting is a stubborn holdover from our country’s racist past,” but in fact, evidence of hunting has been discovered in northern Tanzania, where scientist believe all human life originated from. ABC News recently