Can you both value life and take it? You can if you are a hunter.
Being a hunter, or angler, comes down to the essential difference between concern over animal populations and concern over one animal.

It must have torn my dad’s insides out to watch me sitting there in the duck boat with a wounded mallard in my lap, holding it and thinking of it as a pet, asking if we could take it home and see if it would live.
The dog had brought it back alive and now the duck and I were sitting together on a seat cushion. My dad was splitting time between watching the sky for more ducks and looking down at me, while trying to come up with a strategy for handling the situation. He handled it like he handled most situations, by first letting it develop to see if I would change my mind; then, after about a half-hour, by sitting next to me and appealing to common sense about how the duck was not going to live for long and it wasn’t practical to keep a duck in a cardboard box in the garage.
In the end, I let him finish it off, and watched to see how it was done.
I suppose I was about eight years old on that day, and it was a natural set of feelings, some of which have never left me. The final dispatch has never been something to celebrate in my mind, whether it’s a pheasant in the field or a walleye at the fillet table.