i've seen that joke on a bumper sticker before. i sure doubt the person who told you this joke is native american. i think it's yet another example of how people feel you are criticizing them just by being vegetarian, even if you're not making an issue of it.
2 things come to mind. i think this pretense that people hunt for food is bogus; i have personally met far more people who hunt for sport than for sustenance. if they do happen to eat their game, they will conveniently use it to defend their killing hobby.

(aside: personally i don't how it's such an accomplishment or even a challenge to sit on your butt from a comfortable distance and aim a 3000-feet-per-second projectile into an unwitting victim and ''manage'' to bring him down).

furthermore i am pretty certain that people who hunt wolves, bobcats, mountain lions, etc. don't eat the meat of the animal they've slain. (that's what makes sarah palin's comment 'i eat therefore i hunt' so indefensibly stupid, given that she enjoys killing wolves). another lame rationalization i encounter from hunters is that they're doing the ecosystem a favor and preventing overpopulation by culling the herd. do any of these guys go after weak and sick deer? no, they're trying to land trophy bucks.

on a lighter note, i used to have a friend who lived near the california coast. he was completely vegetarian, but he went fishing occasionally. i asked him how he reconciled this with his vegetarianism. he didn't keep the fish, instead he would toss them to the sea lions. imagine if hunters left the carcasses of their kills for coyotes, etc.

but back to the joke -- at least it is widely believed that many native american tribes respected all life, even that of the animals they hunted, in practice thanking the spirit of the animal who provided them with their meat. i suspect the dumb vegetarian joke is completely inconsistent with any real native american beliefs.

Hi Booky~

Here is the joke a friend of mine told me:

What do you call a vegetarian with diarrhea?




A salad shooter!!!!!

Okay, that is a rough anti-Veggie joke. I think I would get a little ticked off if some one said that to me.

And "Spiky", I loved your posting as it touches my heart.

Hunting and killing defenseless and innocent animals is a low and petty accomplishment. And I hate it too when they claim to be helping the animals by killing them. And a fisherman that throws the fish back in are just taking pleasure in tormenting and torturing the fish.

And your last paragraph did it for me and I wish I had told it yesterday at the Sports Store - that native American Indians respected the animals and they did not kill for fun or for sport like it is done in our society.

Well I took that same friend back to that same Sporting Store and this time they told me that many fish will die when the fish is thrown back in.

They said that the fish is so stressed out and excited from being hooked and pulled in that even if the fisher person throws the fish back then the fish often dies anyway.

I do not know if this is true or not, because it might just be a way to justify not throwing the fish back, or it might be a way of insulting those fishers that do throw back, because otherwise they are saying that the fish has some strong feelings and they the fishers do not care about anything.

I feel sorry for the fish.