Rock musician and hunting enthusiast Ted Nugent, who recently lost his beloved family dog Happy, voiced his support for hunting rights on the latest episode of “The Chuck Shute Podcast.”
Reflecting on how he cried for days after Happy‘s passing, Ted stated in part: “I eat venison. I don’t eat dogs. Barack Obama eats dogs, but I don’t eat dogs. And I have some friends in Vietnam and China that eat dogs, and it’s meat. If that’s what you wanna eat, but we don’t have that relationship with our dogs. Even though if you go to a Chinese restaurant, I promise you you’re gonna eat dogs at some point and cats. The point is, is that I’m a hunter, a fisherman and trapper. I harvest the surplus to maintain a healthy environment. Anybody who’s got a problem with that is like brain dead. You’ve gotta be the dumbest motherf**ker on the planet to think you can stop hunting for one season.
“I donate tons of venison, which is the purest, most healthy, nutritious, delicious protein in the world. [My wife] Shemane and I, and my son, my family, we donate tons of venison to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Do you really know somebody that has a problem with that? Can you realize how soulless, how nasty a person would have to be to go, ‘Well, you shouldn’t feed the homeless venison.’ [Laughs] F**k you. “
Addressing the criticism that hunting is often seen as inhumane and cruel to animals, Ted said: “As a hunter, fisherman and trapper, I provide the most humane, conscientious, moral, quick death of anything that dies in nature. When you don’t hunt, disease runs in, distemper and rabies.
“When I drove to Detroit yesterday to jam with a bunch of guys, and even going 100 miles an hour in my Hellcat, I counted, just visible, 111 dead deer. I couldn’t keep up with the raccoons and the possums and the skunks and the other dead [animals]. I mean, there’s death every 50 feet. So if you stop hunting for one year, can you imagine the terror, the harm, the painful, agonizing death from cars and disease and overpopulation?
“To be against hunting is to literally have no soul,” Nugent further said. “You have no soul. And quite honestly, my son Rocco is a vegan and his new fiancée, they’re vegans. They have dietary considerations. I have no problem with that. I’ve never said, ‘You have to eat meat,’ but some of these nutcases go, ‘You’re cruel for eating deer.’ No, you’re cruel for being against a meaningful science-based harvest of the deer, because they’re having fawns now, and if I didn’t kill a bunch of deer on my swamp, there’d be no room for those fawns and they would eat all the prime vegetation and they would end up…
“I’m a hunter and I couldn’t be more proud. In fact, there’s a gay pride month. Is that what that is? Well, I’m having a hunter pride month. I’m celebrating that I’m a hunter and I’m proud to be an American hunter. And anybody that’s got a problem with that, shut the f**k up.”
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