Open Letter to Critics of Deer Hunting

Lots of positive things come from deer hunting, including most of the money that supports all wildlife. (Photo courtesy of Steve Sorensen)

I sometimes wonder if people patrol the social media sites to look for people they can throw mud at. They sure find them in deer hunters who use photos to share their success with their friends.

If I'm going to criticize something, I don't just launch an emotional tirade against it. I want to make sure I know enough about the topic for my criticisms to make sense. I've thought about this for a long time, and I'm convinced that the critics of deer hunting don't actually know what they're criticizing. Read my "Open Letter to Critics of Deer Hunting," which will probably be more relevant to hunters than to their critics because, well, their critics do better when they don't know what they're talking about.

Steve Sorensen's bi-weekly newspaper column, "The Everyday Hunter," appears in the Forest County News Journal (Tionesta, PA), the Corry Journal (Corry, PA), both part of the Sample News Group. Also the Warren Times Observer (Warren, PA), and the Jamestown Post-Journal (Jamestown, NY), both Ogden Newspapers. If you'd like to see "The Everyday Hunter" in your local newspaper, have your editor contact me.

Scroll down to read "Open Letter to Critics of Deer Hunting." (First published at www.EverydayHunter.com, May 26, 2025.)

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To access more of Steve's writing on hunting topics, go to the home page of his blog, Mission: Hunter.

Open Letter to Critics of Deer Hunting 

Steve Sorensen

’Tis the season for hunters to shoot deer and post pictures of them on social media. ’Tis also the season to shame hunters for shooting beautiful animals and to proclaim the injustice of killing innocent deer. (You know who you are. You are anti-hunting zealots, animal rights ideologues, and people who learn their wildlife science from Walt Disney. Or maybe you just unwittingly follow the crowd.)

Think about this in today’s terms. People are now being blamed for injustices their ancestors committed. If we carry the guilt of our ancestors on this or that particular issue, then by that same standard every critic of deer hunters has an ancestry that includes hunters, so you are guilty for the animals your ancestors killed. That’s nonsense, and it’s time for people to stop believing it.

Hunters feel a sense of satisfaction in accomplishing a goal, and it’s okay for them to pause and reflect on the sacrifice their deer made. It’s good to give thanks to our Creator for the gift of the harvest, just as people in the Bible did. Oh! You don’t want to make this “religious”? Fine. Then plug in your own pedigree, your lineage, your forerunners, whatever they believed and wherever they came from. Face it. Your people were hunters, and they thanked God for providing.

It’s okay to make our success public because hunting and killing a deer is not shameful or offensive. I’m not saying hunters should beat their chests and dance a jig over the deer they shoot, but then I haven’t seen Dan Boone’s video. Or Teddy Roosevelt’s. Or Fred Bear’s. (Crack a smile. That’s a joke.) If there’s a line to be drawn, let’s raise the banner of free speech and give hunters the freedom to draw the line for themselves. You can look at our pictures, or not. Lots of people say and do things you don’t like, and you just move on. So move on here.

Hunters should be free to go ahead and pump their fists, like you do when you make a long putt on the golf course, or drain a 3-point shot in your YMCA basketball league. Why hide honest emotion? Why not celebrate the kid who hit a home run? The truth is there’s still a kid in you, too! (Here’s some advice — let the kid out once in a while.)

Killing a deer is legal, moral, and fair, so educate yourself. Hunters have advocated for laws insuring wildlife is a renewable resource. Hunters play the key role in wildlife management, and their role keeps wildlife healthy, abundant and accessible to hunters and non-hunters alike. That’s good. Understand it. Appreciate it.

Killing a deer is also moral. We could name some immoralities the law allows, and soon we’d get into opinions. But hunting is moral, and that’s not a matter of opinion. Hunting has been moral throughout human history, and nothing has changed to make it immoral. Technology doesn’t determine whether or not something is moral. Mechanized farming, modern refrigeration, industrial food preparation and packaging, and rapid food distribution systems do not make growing your own food wrong, nor do they make killing your own food wrong. That’s not opinion. That’s objective truth.

Some say hunting is unfair to the deer. Not true. On the surface it might look true, but take a deeper look. You’re saying they can’t shoot back? Right, but even without bullets and arrows deer can wipe out other animals if we let them. What would be unfair is to permit the balance of nature to go awry by allowing deer to devour the habitat of other wildlife species, the ones we don’t shoot with bullets and arrows. If you want fairness, hear this — hunters make sure deer don’t destroy habitat that supports non-game species.

Wildlife biologists call deer a “keystone species” in North America. That means the population dynamics of deer will affect other species. For example, do you know what happens to songbirds when we have too many deer? It’s not a hard thing to understand, so stay tuned and I’ll tell you.

Deer hunting is legal, moral, fair to the deer, and eminently fair to other wildlife species. And it’s fair to anyone who wants to see wildlife thrive. So, if you remain a foe of deer hunting, you need to know the things you’re actually for:

1. You are for more deer-car collisions, higher insurance rates, and more loss of human life on the highways. (Roughly 200 people die every year in deer/car collisions. You want more?)

2. You support more crop damage for farmers, so you support higher food prices.  

3. You wish for more deer disease, because deer concentrate around food sources where disease transmission is higher. (Don’t like pandemics? Hunters help prevent them in wildlife.)

4. You ask for more malnourished deer. Malnourished deer are smaller, weaker, less capable of defending themselves from predators, and don’t survive winter as well.

5. You want fewer songbirds because without sufficient food overpopulated deer devour the habitat where songbirds live, eat, nest, and raise their young. (Is that fair to songbirds?)

6. You favor more deer eating your expensive shrubbery because overpopulation leads to destruction of their own natural food sources. Where else will they go to eat?

7. You encourage more natural predation by coyotes, bears and other predators, so you advocate suffering far beyond what a hunter’s bullet or arrow causes. (In case you forgot, human hunters are the merciful predators. We don’t eat deer while the deer is still alive.)

8. You promote less timber regeneration so our children will pay higher costs for scarcer lumber. (Look what deer do to your shrubbery. Think what they’ve done to baby oak trees.)

9. You endorse lower funding for wildlife because hunters’ dollars are what funds the majority of wildlife conservation. (Ever hear of Pittman-Robertson? Look it up.)

Being against hunting means you are for all these negative outcomes, and more. So, if you really want to get rid of hunters, you’ll cause some big problems and a lot of suffering.

Money that hunters provided through the Pittman-Robertson Fund is what established seasons and bag limits, and insured the survival of many species. It’s what continues to enhance untold acres of public wildlife habitat supporting all game and non-game species. It led to the restoration of today’s healthy bald eagle populations. (When you see an eagle, thank a hunter.)

And you can thank a woman hunter too, instead of tossing your insult grenades whenever a woman or a girl posts a photo of a deer harvest on social media. Whether the female hunter is a professional entertainer, a Catholic nun, or a junior high girl, you always do that. Stop it.

You think it’s a big deal when a female in a male-dominated sport like football kicks field goals because you want to show support for women. So why do you attack women hunters? You do it because females are the fastest growing segment of the hunting population, and because you think they’re vulnerable. You’re actually conflicted about that (and by the fact that you wouldn’t be here if your own ancestors weren’t hunters), so the solution to your problem is to just stop it. Stop treating female hunters as though they’re somehow more loathsome even than men.

Or, if you don’t want to stop, you should at least try to be consistent. You should start attacking the millions of women who appreciate their husbands and sons bringing home the venison for the family table. But they’re not such an easy target, are they?

So instead, start appreciating the growing ranks of female hunters. You look bad when you denounce female hunters, not only to hunters, but to the public you’re trying to win.

Would you still like to eliminate deer hunting? Hunters are the key component to the plan in place now, so what plan do you have for insuring that wildlife thrives? Without hunters (especially deer hunters) funding for wildlife in North America will be lost like a diamond dropped in the middle of Lake Superior. We will lose education, law enforcement, research, and so much more. We will lose the battle to protect species that are threatened or endangered.

So, posting pictures of deer we harvest on social media is good. It reminds everyone of some important things. You can think of more, but here are four of them:

1.  It reminds us that hunters pay the lion’s share toward wildlife conservation. (Actually, it’s infinitely more than the lion’s share, because lions pay nothing toward habitat, law enforcement, education, research… you get the picture.)

2.  It reminds us that regulated hunting is the sustainable use of an abundant and renewable natural resource. (To repeat, North America’s system of managing and conserving wildlife far surpasses what any other continent has.) 

3.  It reminds us of the legacy of every human being. (Yeah, probably a few anti-hunters don’t want to be reminded, and can’t appreciate their heritage. They’re the losers.)

4.  And it reminds everyone that we ought to have at least a dim picture in our minds of where our food comes from. (Track back a little farther than that shrink-wrapped package of bloodless burgers you brought home the other day.) 

Finally, for anyone who does want to make a religious point against hunting, don’t use the Bible and especially don’t use the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” It has nothing to do with hunting, or with the killing of wildlife. The meaning is “Do not murder,” and the idea behind it is that killing a fellow human being is wrong because humans are the only creature made in the image of God, so killing an innocent human being is an attack on the image of God.

Therefore, killing a deer (or any other animal) is not murder. It is the proper use of a renewable provision God has given us. That means if we play our role responsibly, he gives us more. We can enjoy the lives of deer and we can appreciate their deaths. Yes, there’s irony in that, and it’s irony we can all live with. In fact, we must live with it because abdicating the role hunters play will lead to far more suffering than all hunters together could ever cause.

Hunters are your fellow human beings. You can’t beat us with logic, or common sense, or science. You can’t beat us with harassment and shaming. You can’t beat us by attacking kids and women. So how about uniting with your fellow humans around our common heritage, around our common interest in seeing that wildlife will always have a place in this land, and around mutual respect for an honorable, timeless tradition?

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When “The Everyday Hunter” isn’t hunting, he’s thinking about hunting, talking about hunting, dreaming about hunting, writing about hunting, or wishing he were hunting. If you want to tell Steve exactly where your favorite hunting spot is, contact him through his website, www.EverydayHunter.com. He writes for top outdoor magazines, and won the 2015, 2018, and 2023 national “Pinnacle Award” for outdoor writing.