What a thought-provoking post. I would imagine it makes all of us examine the reasons why we enjoy hunting, both noble and less-than-noble, and that's a good thing.
I'm not going to lie to you though - it's a tough question to answer. Either you end up sounding really hokey, or you end up sounding like Ted Nugent. ("spirit of the wild" and all that jazz) For me, it's somewhere in between. I like the preparation, the gear, knowing the terrain, knowing the environment, knowing my gun. I like studying the animals, knowing their habits, predicting their behavior, reading their signs, getting to know them well. The kill for me isn't really the point of hunting, but it's the culmination of hunting. It's fulfilling a predatory aspect of my nature (See? Here I go sounding like Nugent...) that I don't get anywhere else.
OK, let me describe it like this...
I'm in the woods on a crystal clear, cold morning. I've studied the terrain. I've done my homework. I know the prey and his habits and his diet and his routine. I've put myself in what I think is the best possible spot, and I've practiced with my weapon and tuned it and prepared it. Then you hear a stick break, or the leaves rustle, or some undefinable element changes in the environment, and I
know he's there. My nostrils flare, my eyes widen, my pulse jumps, my adrenaline levels go through the roof, and all of that preparation and thought and practice and homework comes down to
this single solitary moment of perfection. Success or failure. Provide for my family or come home empty-handed. In that moment I'm no different than a caveman with a spear sneaking up on a mammoth, or an indian with a bow hunting for deer. In that moment, I'm not thinking about my cell phone, or my credit card bills, or my dumbass boss, or anything. It's just me, and the prey, and the moment.
See? I told you it was impossible to discuss this without getting hokey.
OK, so let me stop being hokey and address your specific concerns.
I'm scared of wounding an animal, of not making a clean kill, and it suffers needlessly through my fault.
All good hunters that I know of worry about that. We minimize it by using weapons we know will deliver a clean kill, being careful about when and what we shoot, and being willing to let an animal go by if we don't feel comfortable with the shot. It's not perfect, and we make errors sometimes, but by and large it's enough.
I'm worried that I'm not a good enough shot to go hunting.
Yeah, we all worry about that too. That gives us a reason to practice though, and we enjoy practicing, and without that pressure of worrying about it, hunting would be a lot less of a thrill.
What if I don't like the way it tastes?
Hunters for the Hungry are great organizations. You should see if there's a branch in your state. If not, I'd be willing to bet you have friends who love venison. There's no shame in giving the meat away. The only shame would be in wasting it.
I've never seen an animal cleaned/dressed, and I don't know what parts can or cannot be eaten.
There are a LOT of books out there that will help you with this part, but there's no substitute for experience. I would strongly suggest finding a friend or neighbor who hunts and go with them, at least the first few times. Gutting, cleaning, butchering and preparing a game animal is... well, it's not hard - but it's complex, and easy to screw up. If you screw up, the meat gets wasted, and then you feel bad about that.
Plus deer are cute. Raccoons, rabbits, and all wild cats are cute to me.
The tongue-in-cheek response to that would be to say that they get a lot less cute when you've been trudging around in the woods freezing your butt off all day looking for them. The serious response would be to say that deer also get a lot less cute when they're malnourished and starving to death, which is what happens to them when there's no population controls and there are more deer than the land can support. Since hunters and car bumpers are about the only predators that deer have these days, hunting them and culling the herd becomes a pretty serious responsibility.
I'm scared by the myths
Every 14-year old boy who's anxious about killing his first buck is scared to death about that stuff too. Relax about that. We don't drink the blood, we don't rub anything on our faces, and we don't strip naked and dance around. Although maybe Nugent does. You'd have to ask him about that one. About the worst thing that we'll do is make you help field dress it, which will probably make you throw up the first time, which is no big deal. We all threw up the first time too. Sometimes we still throw up a little bit, no matter how many times we've done it.
Favorite myth story... my cousin was 15 years old and had just shot his first buck. A nice 7-point, if I remember correctly. Several of us had gathered around, and we'd just finished field dressing it, and one of my uncles was rigging up the ropes to drag it out. My cousin asked (with a nervous stammer) "Ummm... is there any kind of... you know, traditional kind of thing that I have to do now?" and my dad said "Yeah. See that gutpile over there? We're going to take every bit of that and shove it up your &^%$."
The look on my cousin's face (as I'm sure you can imagine) was priceless.
Can I get over this, should I get over this, or should I resign myself to being strictly a defensive shooter?
Can you? Of course you can. Should you? That's a question only you can answer. It's not like you're less of a shooter if you don't hunt, but you are missing out on something you might get a lot of enjoyment out of.
