I guess I was making the "wild" assumption that everyone understoodmy responsewas about "hunting" obsessions and "legal" ones at that.
legal has NEVER been what is and isn't ethical
The thread is aboutthe obsession some have with shooting big bucks being harmfull to the sport so as far as I'm concerned your supossed analogy with sex and pornographyis just nuts! You seem to want to take this down an ethics path.
Isn't that what this discussion is about ? What is and isn't hunting ?
It's a no brainer that an obsession with some illegal, illicit or unethicalbehavior is harmfull.
I used a deer tag last year on a deer that was hit and crippled by a car. Illegal ........... but I did it.
Was that harmful ?
I kept a 15 1/2" trout in 16" trout waters because I gill hooked it and it was dead shortly after landing it.
Was that harmful ? It was illegal.
That's just not what we're talking about. A single minded pursuit of a big buck is something that islegal and ethical and in fact is something most hunters, though not obsessed with the idea, do indeed aspire to.
Take the two examples above. Now, compare them with a guy who buys a compound on Monday, practices 3 days, hunts on Saturday and wounds 2 does in the morning, never finds them, then uses his 1 tag in the evening to kill a young buck.
Now Sylvan ........... you tell which 3, in order, is most ethical.
After you place the slob hunter in the last example at the bottom, we can then go on to talk about how legal what that slob did. We can also go into a nice long chat about EBAY "hunts", preseve "hunts" and chasing "wildlife" about a 100 acre pen and how legal all that is, how "ethical" it is, and the impacts it all has on the sport of hunting.