In a new episode of The Chuck Shute Podcast, Ted Nugent defended hunting despite his son being a vegan.
The rocker asserted that hunting is crucial for maintaining a healthy environment and responded to criticisms of being cruel to animals:
“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.”
Nugent Doesn’t Understand Anti-Hunting Sentiments
Later in the conversation, Nugent elaborated on his pro-hunting stance:
“To be against hunting is to literally have no soul. You have no soul. 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.'”
He continued:
“No, you’re cruel for being against a meaningful science-based harvest of the deer. 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…”
Nugent’s Previous Comments on Veganism
Previously, Nugent told 96.1 KLPX radio station in 2021 that vegans cause the most animal deaths due to crop farming for products like corn, soybeans, wheat, and barley, which kills many animals each year:
“If you wanna be responsible for the most death possible, become a vegan. Because behind that tractor and that plough and that disc, unless you hide and deny it, are crows and seagulls following that tractor growing your tofu because the plough and the disc dismember and mutilate everything in those gazillion acres — every squirrel, every ground-nesting gopher, every ground-nesting bird, every snake, every turtle, every animal in that field that’s turned into tofu is slaughtered by the gazillion.”
Nugent also explained that his son and a friend are vegans for health reasons, which he respects. However, he argues that vegan diets cause more animal deaths due to crop farming. Nugent believes people are unaware of this and questions why it’s not taught in schools.
You can watch the rest of Nugent’s interview below.
