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... which is why this is one of the the high arts of hunting.
Imagine shooting a big elk or moose. They are often in the forest, so you can't actually see them until you are pretty close. Shooting an animal that's the size of a cow or a horse, at 50 yards, is easy. Plus, you are typically using pretty substantial bullets, which fly pretty straight, even if you get the elk or moose in a clearing, and have to take a long shot (a few hundred yards). Any shot much longer, and your bullet doesn't have enough oompf left for a clean kill, and big-game hunters are very very insisting on a humane, quick death. The equipment and supplies are commonly available, and not very expensive.
Now contrast that with hunting prairie dogs. They are about 6" or 8" tall. If you are a boring kind of person, you hunt them with a .22 rifle at 30 yards. Anyone can do that. But to really prove your chops, you go out to the Dakotas or some flat prairie state, and you hunt them at 300 or 400 yards. This requires super-accurate rifles (starting at a few grand, like a nice Cooper), really expensive optics (good scopes like high-end Leupold, Swarowski, Leitz start at about a grand), extremely straight-shooting bullets (like the .204 Ruger, which starts out at Mach 4), carefully hand-loaded ammunition that's carefully tuned to your specific rifle, and very high skill levels. You have to get a good feeling for estimating distances, quickly and intuitively compensate for bullet drop, and "dope the wind" (find out the wind direction, and compensate for it). Plus, these little critters are by their nature small, and therefore fast-moving (you've never seen a moose jump down into a hole into a ground, for good reasons), so shooting them requires speed, and an understanding of the behavior of the animal (will he hold still, or won't he).
There are other hunting disciplines that are extremely difficult. Tracking rare or unusual game over large distances. Hunting dangerous game (cape buffalo in Africa, large predators such as Grizzly or the large cats). Hunting large game with bow and arrow only. But varmint shooting can be just as difficult, except at the end you don't have a large trophy suitable for mounting on the living room wall (if you are that kind of person), but only a small pile of dead rodents.
Oh, and farmers tend to love it if you come hunt varmints such as prairie dogs on their fields - because they destroy crops, make large holes that damage agricultural equipment, and such.
Disclaimer: I personally don't hunt at all, and I'm sure I wouldn't get any joy out of killing animals myself. Even though I'm a gun owner and competitive shooter, I don't have any rifles suitable for hunting, nor a hunting license (but I have rifles suitable for target shooting). I've been known to use guns on half-dead rats caught in rat traps (to give them a speedier trip to their eternal gnawing grounds), and in self-defense against rattlesnakes (just last Saturday, the first rattler of the season was found less than 3' from our patio, and it it was a beauty: pretty big, mean and nasty looking, in the mood for eating little boys, and it died of high-velocity lead poisoning).
Getting back to the original topic: My defense of varmint shooting does not in any form exculpate Governor Romney. He is a liar and hypocrite, plain and simple. Just like Senator Kerry did a few years ago, he's trying to dishonestly inflate his "sportsman's" credentials, for obvious political reasons. Once I find that he is dishonest on this one topic, why should I expect him to be honest on any other topic?
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