I just don’t quite know what to make of this. All I know is that as I read it, I could feel myself tensing internally. Then I reached this part:
“I said, ‘Tre, you missed the bear,’ ” Mike Merritt said. “He said, ‘Paw-paw I squeezed the trigger and I didn’t close my eyes. I killed him.”‘
The bear turned out to be 445 pounds — 12 times the weight of Tre. Mike Merritt said tears rolled down his cheeks when he found out his grandson killed the enormous bear.
Tre Merritt’s father said he began teaching his son to shoot when he was just 2 ½ years old, and said Tre killed three deer last year.
The family plans to get a life-sized mount of the bear, but where they will put has yet to be determined.
Yeah, I feel tears in my eyes too. But I’ll bet it’s not for the same reasons.
Trees & Flowers & Birds! 
There aren’t words enough to describe how much I loathe hunting. This story made me angry, too. When I lived in PA, I used to seethe every time the schools were closed on the first day of [defenseless animal] season.
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Here’s where my upbringing trumps my general liberal thinking. 🙂 Hunting, per se, doesn’t bother me, particularly deer hunting. If it weren’t for hunting season controlling the deer population, many of them would starve over the winter because so many of the natural predators aren’t around to cull the herd.
However, it does bother me to see animals like bears killed for no good reason. They’ll probably mount it in that standing, threatening pose as well, which is not what bears typically do. Adventure Guy, who loves to hunt, said he’d never hunt bears after seeing them in the wild in Alaska. Though they did annoy him by catching way more fish that he did!
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I am in LSM’s camp on this one. That said, I have no desire to hunt and I am glad my husband feels the same way. We do fish. Other than what we eat, it is catch and release!
My Father-in-law is a hunter and presented a shotgun to my son on his 8th Birthday. It went back to Georgia with him.
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