Simple. Tell her how many times you don't tag game. How you study the animals so closely you know their habits. How much you hate anything that destroys their habitat or damages their population. Talk about how when you do make a kill it is an insanely happy moment but in the same respectful and thankful. I don't feel sad so I've never used that one, when I kill something I treat the moment like how I'd treat it once a friend dies, celebration of the life lived. The fact that some animals I've seen for years and to know what they've gone through I find it much better healthwise to eat them then that farm raised stuff. And I'm not just talking cows and chicken. A vegetarian eats no meat but still has no connection to the land. They don't take into account that the nutrients dumped on to their plants is enough to create an entire dead zone in the ocean. They don't see that everything is truly connected in the way a true hunter does. Hell, even those all super goody goody farms will kill animals or use some type of deterrent or fence to keep animals from their harvest. Which means they took the land from the animals, then killed or continuously chase them away, probably use irragated water which causes all sorts of trouble in creeks and rivers or they put up dams. That's a real nice way to ruin an ecosystem. They all use some sort of manure and a goody goody farm probably uses straight cow poop. Lovely chemical composition that once watered leaks into the soil so they have to add stuff to the soil to remain healthy or it dies and then nothing grows. And that crap(literally) gets into the watershed. Guess what fish need, balanced Ph levels. So then they still killing these streams. Land and water ecosystems are both now damaged all because these people prefer a salad over meat and want their salad all natural but won't use the effort to cultivate their own lettuce crop. Rooftop gardening would be way more common if these people really cared. We don't just kill animals. We connect with nature in a way no other person can possibly understand. Sad part though is today's hunter cares more about all this for the wrong reasons. He'll do it all and then kill that buck named giaganticrackasaurus and then post it to everywhere about his trophy buck he's been watching on trail camera and baiting for years. If you need bait to hunt then you aren't hunting, your harvesting. Nothing wrong with that, just don't call yourself a hunter because your still in the infancy of mankind gathering. The fact that I can trail a deer on dry ground, tell a fox track from a coyote, a cougar from a dog, a squirrel warning bark to a squirrel get out of here, a deer chewed leaf from a rodent, a coyote kill from a cougar kill, a rock turned over for bugs from a rock that naturally rolled down, a sapling that can become an arrow and a stone that can become an arrowhead, how long till sunset and which way is north day or night, where to find game and where to camp out of the way all gives credit to the connection we can hold with the land. So next time someone wants to call you a pycho killer for being a hunter, you ask if they can tell you what happens in a deer herd when the oldest buck dies wether from a gun, a bow or pack of coyotes. Most won't know, more should.
