"I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her."
Ellen DeGeneres

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."
P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

"The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians--except for the occasional mountain lion steak."
Ted Nugent

"Know something? I'd lay even odds that between the people following us and the people hunting us, we've become this city's principle means of employment. Tal Verrar's entire economy is now based on fucking with us."
Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies

"If we act like prey, they'll act like predators"
Alyxandra Harvey, My Love Lies Bleeding

"In a werewolf pack, you cannot interfere with the mate choice of a clan fellow. You cannot intentionally harm that werewolf's chosen mate. You are not, however, required to help that person should he find himself in a life - threatening situation.

Somehow, Zeb had managed to stumble into several such situations in the few months since he 'd been engaged to Jolene. He'd had several hunting "accidents" while visiting the McClaine farm, even though he didn't hunt. The brakes on his car had failed while he was driving home from the farm--twice. Also, a running chainsaw mysteriously fell on him from a hayloft.
He would never get that pinkie toe back."
Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men

"Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll onto the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus's. "I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave," he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. "I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service...my stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail."
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle Of The Ninth

"Sure, some find gunning down unsuspecting, innocent animals to be a real hoot. I mean, for Christ sake, they mantle the decapitated, formaldehyde-stuffed heads on the wall. Then, of course, there are the people who enjoy putting sunglasses or hats on it, even putting a blowout in its mouth as if it were an avid party animal. If it had any hands, there would surely be a plastic cup full of cheap beer in it, as well. We can't forget that it would be named some horrendous name, such as Bill or Frank, something so plain, ordinary, and down-right ridiculous that makes me want to bitch-slap the perpetrators. "
Chase Brooks

"Hi! handsome hunting man
Fire your little gun.
Bang! Now the animal
is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!"
Walter de la Mare, Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Young People

"Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering."
Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

"Hunting and fishing involve killing animals with devices (such as guns) for which the animals have not evolved natural defenses. No animal on earth has adequate defense against a human armed with a gun, a bow and arrow, a trap that can maim, a snare that can strangle, or a fishing lure designed for the sole purpose of fooling fish into thinking they have found something to eat"
Marc Bekoff, Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

"(On Baron von Blixen:)

Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky."
Beryl Markham, West with the Night

"The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think."
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

"Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others."
John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

"I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting."
Beryl Markham, West with the Night

"For us hunting wasn't a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us. Lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects. We lived close to the animals we ate. We knew their habits and that knowledge deepened our thanks to them and the land that made them."
Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

"A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, and then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff."
Stefan Bechtel, Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

"I've decided to donate my arsenal of machine guns to a hunting charity. That should help raze a million bucks."
Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

"These enthusiasts often like to hang signs that say "Gone Fishin'" or "Gone Huntin'". But what these slogans really mean is "Gone Killing."
Marc Bekoff, Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

"None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.

He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.

The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime."
Beryl Markham, West with the Night

"- Все охотятся в этой жизни друг за другом. И получается - сперва ты охотник, потом ты же добыча.
(Предводитель хулиганов - Ёжики-Матвею Радомиру)"
Vladislav Krapivin, Застава на Якорном поле. Крик петуха.

"Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour."
Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film

"Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow."
Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

"It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish."
Beryl Markham, West with the Night

"(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:)

"Lion, rifles -- and stupidity."
Beryl Markham, West with the Night

"This is what it means to be a fanatic - but a fanatic, that is to say, in a very special sense. It has little in common with the obsession of the politician or the artist, for instance, for both of these understand in a greater or lesser degree the impulse which drives them. But the sportsman fanatic - that is another matter entirely.

His thoughts fixed solely on a vision of that mounted trophy against the wall, the eyes now dead that were once living, the tremulous nostrils stilled, the sensitive pricked ears closed to sound at the instant when the rifle shot echoed from the naked rocks, this man hunts his quarry through some instinct unknown even to himself.

Stephen was a sportsman of this kind. It was not the skill needed that drove him, nor the delight and excitement of the stalk itself, but a desire, so I told myself, to destroy something beautiful and rare. Hence his obsession with chamois. ("The Chamois")"
Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories

"It's a pretty blokey magazine [Bacon Busters, 'Australia's only magazine dedicated to pig hunting'], but they have women in it too. There's a 'Boars and Babes' section: women in bikinis sitting on big old pigs."
Andrew Symonds

"Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin."
Pete Hautman, Short Money

"We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerors. Possibly it feels good to these men to be superior to animals, but it does seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it. Often a man who is afraid must constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must keep a tangible record of his courage. For ourselves, we have had mounted in a small hardwood plaque one perfect borrego [bighorn sheep] dropping. And where another man can say, "There was an animal, but because I am greater than he, he is dead and I am alive, and there is his head to prove it," we can say, "There was an animal, and for all we know there still is and here is proof of it. He was very healthy when we last heard of him."
John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez