Depends on the killer, I guess
A hunting joke:
Three guys go on a hunting trip. It isn't a particularly fruitful day. Empty-handed, they start their trek back to the campsite. Bob says, "Hey, you guys go ahead. I need to take a shit."
So Bob leaves the trail to squat behind a tree while his friends head on to the campsite. Along the way, Fred and Joe spy a prize buck just waiting to be killed. It's over quickly.
But it's hard to lug this thing all the way back to the campsite, so they start cutting it up in the field. It takes a while, and eventually Fred wonders, "Where the hell is Bob?"
So Joe goes looking for Bob and finds him asleep with his back against a log. Bastard! Joe thinks, and then an idea occurs to him. He returns to Fred and the buck and scoops up the entrails, carrying them to where Bob is and deposits them behind the log.
Eventually, Joe and Fred get the buck back to camp, but still there's no sign of Bob. Worried that he might have just done something really stupid, like invite a bear to attack Bob, he sets out to find his friend. Halfway there, he finds Bob walking gingerly back to camp.
"Bob! Are you okay? What the hell happened?"
Bob shakes his head in disbelief. "Man," he says, "I pushed so hard I shit my guts out. But it's okay. With a little brains and a stick, I managed to fix everything."
As with many things, there is a difference between theory and practice. Journalists are defenders of the common man, or so says the myth. Then again, the state of journalism today is pretty sad. Capitalism is supposed to create opportunity and encourage prosperity, but in practice our society widens the gap between rich and poor, making it harder for the lower strata to move upward. And hunting ... I've heard all sorts of things from the nobility of tradition to the spirituality of killing animals. And yet, the clear majority of hunters I know, when they start talking about their hunting, settle into this apparent bloodlust that completely betrays the nobility and spirituality of the hunt. For these particular people, it's more about killing shit than anything else.
And perhaps one might find that notion demonizing, but in psychological terms that sort of bloodlust just isn't healthy.
As for myself, it depends on the hunter. You want to eat a deer? Fine. Not my thing, but neither is it my place to object. To the other, though, I once had dinner at a house where the hunter liked to kill two of everything; his taxidermist would arrange the animals in the appearance of coitus.
Yeah, a bunch of dead animals fucking.
And the guy was especially proud of an occasion in which he claimed to have been called by friends up in Alaska. Their dogs had treed a large cat of some sort. The guy dropped everything he was doing in McMinnville, Oregon, flew up to Alaska, hired transport out into the middle of nowhere, shot the cat, paid his friends for their help, and left them to deal with the corpse while he flew back to Oregon.
It's really hard to respect hunting if that's how it goes.
On the flip side, we were acquainted with our host through a friend's uncle. And the uncle's brother, as I recall, had been a high-ranking fish and wildlife official in Alaska. The story goes that he got some big animal, an irresistible target, and while he was figuring how to transport it back to his truck, he heard a strange noise. Checking it out, he found that it was a car passing on a nearby road. So he drove a stake into the ground to mark the kill spot, moved the animal out, and literally returned to the kill site with a long tape measure. Turns out he was thirty or so feet too close to a road to be shooting at anything.
Nobody knew.
He went to work the following Monday and resigned.
Severe, I admit, but I can't help but respect that kind of integrity.
I asked around the family. My friend's parents, the uncle's ex-wife, and even the distant lesbian cousin I'd never heard of until I met her. Uniformly, they all vouch for the story.