Most of us have done things that we’d give anything to take back. I still remember taunting a boy in second grade until he ran away from school and embarrassing a girl in junior high who asked me to dance.

I could plead young and stupid, but that only half-applies to the time I went hunting. I was in college and staying at the farm that my friend’s father ran in southwestern Georgia. We grabbed .22s and went looking for squirrels.

We found them, too, perched on fence posts and scrambling out of our way. I also found one high up in an oak tree, although I didn’t realize it until I fired into a nest. A nest. Forty years later, I can still see that squirrel—torn from her family and flung from her home—dropping to the ground.

That cold-blooded lapse always replays in my mind whenever I read a story about hunters “harvesting,” “culling” or “taking” any animal who wanders into their crosshairs. They make it sound downright pastoral, but semantics can’t sway me now. What they do—what I did—is slaughter.

Hunters aren’t keen on using words like that, as one pleasant commenter implied in an online exchange. He called me “a sentimental old fool” and suggested that “slaughter” be reserved for “senseless” killings. Well, hunting might have made sense a few hundred years ago, when human survival was at stake, but today it’s nothing more than a senseless blood sport.

The typical stale defense goes something like this: We harvest/cull/take to prevent starvation among the rest of the herd. We’re environmentalists. We’re dutiful stewards of American values. The Bible gives us dominion over animals. Let’s pick off these arguments one by one:

Given the choice between killing a doe or a 10-point buck, no hunter is going to slaughter the doe, and preventing starvation has nothing to do with it. And that buck may not die right away after being shot. Many animals endure painful, prolonged deaths after they’re injured by hunters. Environmentalists don’t use rifles and crossbows. And hunters don’t create green space—they create a spike in the food supply, which increases breeding among survivors and attracts newcomers. Hunters also disrupt migration and hibernation patterns and destroy families. And as for American values, how about honesty, compassion and fairness?

But the argument that chafes me the most is the one about having dominion over animals, as if Genesis 1:26 were some perverse license to slaughter. Last year, in his encyclical, Pope Francis wrote: “We are not God. … [N]owadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.” The Bible teaches kindness and compassion and love. The definition of dominion doesn’t say a thing about squeezing a trigger.

Surely there are hunters who struggle with semantics. (Psychologists can address denial and—ahem—whatever a hunter may be compensating for.) Some hunters have other issues. A nun in Pennsylvania touched off a furor last month when she posted a picture of herself with a 10-point buck she had slaughtered on the first day of deer season. He had been in a herd of doe with another buck. The hunter, Sister John Paul Bauer, who teaches at a Catholic high school, said she prayed the rosary in her tree stand that morning—”That’s a tradition,” she said—and that her prayers had been answered: “I just think the Blessed Mother did smile upon me.”

Bauer was surprised by the outcry. But what’s really surprising is her blithe disregard for God’s crystal clear commandment: Thou shalt not kill.