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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

If you want to "kill your own food", you could start by killing poultry with your hands -- and cooking the chicken!

No reason to take it to the macho fantasy of the hunter -- that armed with a 21st century high-tech shotgun kills some deer that never had a chance.

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As if the chicken had a chance when you kill it "with your hands"... No reason to be condescending towards another's hobby.

Another's hobby, an animal's death.

Besides, it's not about the chicken having more chances or less. It's that it's a more substantial lesson in "killing one's own food" -- as we eat chicken, beef etc tons of times a year, whereas hunting is 100% hobby and 0% substantial "killing own food".

Speak for yourself. My father and I have a policy that everything we hunt that isn't a varmint (pest control and the like, due to our removal of other apex predators, including dealing with invasive species like coyotes) we also eat. From squirrels and turtledove to elk and moose, and I'm pretty sure that the value of good meat gained by my father's hunting of the latter and mule deer before my mother said NO MORE! (due to the taste) at least covered the expenses of his hunting, which weren't huge. A whole elk or moose goes a long way (I don't remember much about the deer phase, but mule deer aren't small).

So make that at worst 50-50. And there's a lot of poorer people out there for whom the annual deer is a significant and cheap source of high quality meat.

Sounds like the very definition of "outlier". Even if your family does that, nowhere near a significant majority of hunters do anything like 50-50 for hunted vs bought food.

Err, sorry for my lack of clarity, I meant hunting itself is a 50-50 hobby and food collection thing. The one big animal a year back when my father did that, plus upland game birds and miscellania (including the bull frogs I hunted for dissection and giving the legs to my Cajun mother), plus fishing ... maybe as much as 1/3 the year's meat? More than half the red meat, a much smaller fraction of fowl compared to the chicken, and a domestic turkey or three a year.

And that doesn't count veggies (we did garden) plus the cereals that probably accounted for probably over half the calories we consumed.

There need not be a distinction. Your hobby could literally be to kill your own food.

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