As I grab a pinch of tobacco from the Drumm pouch, I tell a friend how much I would love to go quail hunting. We had just finished a class discussion about Cheney’s hunting accident. He turns his head. His jaw lowers and, with a blank face, he asks if I am serious. The utter disappointment in his eyes tells me to proceed gingerly. I lick the paper and roll the tobacco into a cigarette. I gesture with a nod that I am serious, light the tip of my roll-up and begin to tell him about my family’s sportsman traditions. With the same slack-jawed expression, he coldly informs me that I am a murderer.

I came to San Francisco from San Jose well aware that I was walking into a liberal commune; voted one of the most vegetarian-friendly cities by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. However, just because I’m a hunter, I am also called a murderer? Literally speaking, he is dead on (pun intended). But he loaded that word with a lot more gunpowder than there is in a shotgun shell. People have become so quick to judge based on their own lifestyles and too self-righteous to take the time to understand why people choose to hunt—so content to paint the red-circled target on my forehead.

Hunters love nature and most respect it. I might be as bold to say they love it more than a cold can of beer – and that’s a lot of love. We recognize that without the ponds, water and ducks that frolic with the north wind, our sport is dead. There is a strong mystical bond with the outdoors that rages like a river in the veins of hunters. It’s that excited look in their eye the night before the opening day of duck season. It’s blowing a duck call in the bathroom. It’s remaining in the duck blind, long after shoot time is over, to watch the sunset silhouette hundreds of decoys on the pond.

I accompanied my father and brother to the Duck Club near Los Banos every weekend before I left for college. The club consisted of about 13 trailers facing each other with a pebbled-dirt road running through the middle. At 6 a.m., motors would rev up, dogs would jump up on the back seat and headlights would bounce up and down out towards the foggy marsh duck ponds surrounding the entire property.

I looked so majestic with my forest green waders up to my chest, my oversized Shadow-Grass camo Gortex jacket, and 20-gage Benelli shotgun perched across my shoulders. My father and I would walk about a half-mile before arriving at duck blind 41. We would sit on cement cylinders in the middle of the pond among the cattails and toolies dancing in the wind. We would scour the dark sky for hours waiting for ducks to fly by. Sometimes we would shoot the limit (seven) and sometimes we came back to the cabin empty handed with only eggs to eat.

If people would just take the square, white piece of soy out of their mouths and get off their 10-speed Schwinn high horse, they might open up their minds, like their pores after Wednesday night Birkham Yoga class. However, that might be as likely as a hippie on Haight pulling a comb through her hair.

My classmate wanted to paint my story with a murderous scarlet hue. Instead, I choose to take the same can of paint to argue my conviction. Hunters are doing more to protect the environment than most people think.

“There are no other better conservationists than hunters," says Bob McLandess, president of the California Waterfowl Association. “We make sure we aren’t overusing its resources.”

The CWA won conservationist of the year from the Wildlife Western Section, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization. Supported by private contributions, government grants and fundraising game dinners, its mission is to foremost ensure that the environment will thrive. The CWA seeks to protect the open land from current societal pressures to lay concrete over every inch of dirt.

Strict regulations mandated by the California Department of Fish and Game encourages hunters to respect the nature surrounding them. I remember the game wardens sneaking through the Duck Club with their white pick-up trucks in search of hunters without licenses and illegal bird counts. Even though most of the men in the club didn’t like the warden, they would shoot the shit about hunting politics for hours and invite him to stay for a barbeque.

“Seasons and legal methods of take ensure that California's hunter success rate will never be high enough to adversely impact wildlife populations,” said Lorna Bernard, information officer for the California Department of Fish and Game.

The object of hunting isn’t solely to kill as many animals as possible. It’s a misconception that the sport is for satisfying power hungry camouflaged egos. Hunting is a complex relationship with nature that involves a lot of give and take. It’s almost as if hunters take the environment out on romantic dates, flirt under the moonlight, whisper words of commitment, and then the environment is kinda expected to put out.

Instead of pointing the quivering murderous finger at me for my hunting traditions, we should consider the other actual murderously horrid methods of killing animals, like the mass production of meat byproducts or the clothing industries that cage and harvest animals inhumanely in an assembly line—degrading the animal to just capital and not a living creature in the ecosystem.

I have learned from hunting to respect animals and the environment that we both live in and no one with a picket sign or hypocritical granola (mind you it does go well on top of yogurt) agenda is going to disprove that. Learn something from me and think for a couple moments – the precious Boca Burger can wait – about the role of hunters on this earth before deciding that I should be smeared with red paint for believing something else.