During a new episode of The Chuck Shute Podcast, Ted Nugent defended hunting although his son is a vegan.
After saying that hunting is necessary for a healthy environment, the rocker talked about criticism against him 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 Being Against Hunting
In the later part of the conversation, the rocker further detailed his stance on hunting:
“To be against hunting is to literally have no soul. 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.’”
Nugent added:
“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…”
What Did Nugent Say About Veganism Before?
Still, the musician previously told 96.1 KLPX radio station in 2021 that vegans cause the most animal deaths because farming crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, and barley kill 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.”
Ted 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.