Hunting, Literally
I check smalldeadanimals every day, mostly to tsk tsk to myself and marvel at the comments some people feel comfortable making on the internet (and I say - go for it - I like to know who's supporting the New Conservative Government of Canada - who the enemy is so to speak), but this entry by Kate McMillan caught my eye because, well, there's a big photograph of her in the back of the truck, smiling and standing over her supper:
Anyway, I am mildly intrigued by hunters, their motivation, etc, and I was doing okay until I read a comment about a doe having been hit, but not bagged (I dunno - is "bagged" the right word?). And, full disclosure, I'm seriously on my way to becoming vegetarian and/or a just a couple of times/week consumer of organic free range meat (except that organic doesn't necessarily mean free range, does it - and I don't care about the organic so much as I care about the free range) as a political statement against factory farming, so, yeah - I figure I'm more in favour of hunting than factory farming - like, if that's how we ALL get our meat. Otherwise, it just seems to add to the killing fields, as far as I can tell:
Before anyone gets too congratulatory, I did not shoot this one. (I did hit a doe the first morning, but she eluded us despite 3 hours of tracking.)But as far as this buck goes - I pushed about 10 miles of bush over 2 days, had it in my sights at one point but held off as I didn't have a clear line of fire, and helped drag the SOB out of the bush. And it wears my tag. I think I earned the right to claim at least part of the credit. :)
Posted by: Kate at November 22, 2007 8:31 PM
Now see, THAT bugs me because now I'm worried about the doe dying a slow agonizing death out in the woods. The quick kill I'm okay with, I guess, but what about the hunter who just shoots an animal and doesn't kill it? It's like... well... it reminds me a bit of people who think torture is okay under some circumstances, that if it's done as a means to an end - legally - it's actually a good thing because, well, it just is - as long as you're not the one being tortured, of course. And it's not like the deer can shoot back. (Okay. I'm mixing the analogy too much, aren't I.)
But there was another comment I found intriguing:
I used to do a little hunting (just partridge)when I was a kid. I loved "the hunt" but never cared too much about "the killing" or the eating (what little I've tasted of game is too gamey for my tastes).I think the hunt evokes long lost primal hunting instincts and the killing evokes other primal instincts.
TJ, this is the way of life on this planet. There are predators and there are prey. The prey consume the vegetation and breed a lot...and the predators hunt and kill the prey. If it weren't for a human with a rifle, the deer would be hunted by wolves...or by Chevrolets...or slowly die of nalnutrition...or, likely rarely, live in a utopian dream existence.
You don't have to like it...but, to each his/her own, though, eh? I can't understand why anyone would waste their time listening to RAP...you can't understand why people hunt. You need to be more "tolerant", son. ;)
Posted by: Eeyore at November 23, 2007 7:09 AM
True. Deer face the hazard of traffic and we face the hazard of deer in the traffic. Very true. Dying of malnutrition because their habitat is so over developed that their numbers can't really be supported by vegetation? Also true. And wolves. Well, they just aren't that hungry, I guess. Or... do we have any wolves left?
But this is what really got me - what's with the justification in there for killing deer because they (we assume) don't have a utopian dream existence, anyway?
I mean, wasn't that many a Conservative pundit's justification for invading Afghanistan as we did - that Afghans didn't have much to live for anyway, so what the hell - we could only improve their lives in the end? Even if several were lost in the process?
That's what I worried about in the beginning, the pundits who were saying they didn't have much in Afghanistan, anyway, so - what the hell. Because I kept worrying about the Afghans who at least had their lives and maybe even a goat and there we were (and by "we" I mean the Americans with their air strikes followed by us on the ground) - taking away "all that", too. Maybe because we have so much we just can't imagine life being worth living without... what? All our crap?
I dunno. I didn't intend to make an analogy between hunter arguments and the War on Terror, but if people really believe there are two forms of life on this planet, prey and predator, then we're in bigger trouble than I thought. Because if we're living in a world where we justify predatory actions based on the assumption that our prey has nothing much to live for anyway - because they don't have a lot of crap - I think we just might be the bad guys I keep hearing about from the President of the United States straight on down to the Prime Minister of Canada.
