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The following is a Counterpoint column:

By Blanche Stevens

I read with interest Michael Skube's column (Ideas, Jan. 22). My family, hunters and fishermen all, have always eaten what they kill or catch, and I believe that most hunters of small game (including deer) still do that today.

Several sentences in Skube's column caught my attention and emotions more than the others:

"Richard Ford ... once spoke of his fondness for hunting: 'When I take a walk outside, something dies.' The words have a finality that is hard to call sporting: Something dies."

Which is more sporting, Mr. Skube, the slaughter of cattle, poultry, sheep, fish for us to buy in the grocery store or the killing of one's limit of game with a gun? Let us grocery store shoppers not forget that for the beef and veal we eat, someone else has killed, skinned and gutted a steer or calf; for the lamb we eat, someone else has killed, skinned and gutted a sheep or lamb; for the bacon and ham we eat, someone else has killed, skinned and gutted a pig; for the chicken or turkey we eat, someone else has killed, plucked and gutted the poultry; for every fish we eat, someone else has caught and killed, scaled and gutted that animal. The killing may have been done by machine rather than a human, but "something dies" for us to be able to eat.

We grocery store shoppers are so far removed from the immediacy of that killing of our food that we never think of it or of the brevity of those animals' lives. I believe sporting hunters and fishermen are closer to the natural world of kill to eat than most of us and have a respect for nature that we nonhunters do not understand.

I am sorry to read that hunters are vanishing from the North Carolina landscape, but maybe the die-hard hunters are glad the rest of us are not out there in the remaining hunting space.

The writer lives in Greensboro.