So…I woke up this morning from a really good set of dreams (lots of sensory input, like balancing on stones as I crossed a creek and then getting my feet wet, and feeling sunlight on my head and shoulders, and picking up a towel that turned out to be wet…the mind is amazing [before it's destroyed], I mean, I woke up and my feet were still toasty in their socks and the room was dark, etc….also in the dreams I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in a while [Jessie, Tina C., + Ian, all of whom I did have conversations about yesterday so not so surprising]). So good mood. And then, joy of joys, I go out to my mailbox and find mail! Yay! A book I ordered, some bank stuff, and oooh, what’s this with a pretty picture of a beautiful buck on the front…
Wait, that looks like a subscription magazine. Er…“Field and Stream” is a nice title, but what is this “Fall Hunting Special” stuff? They probably wouldn’t be sending me a copy trying to get me to subscribe or whatever if they knew I was so very vegetarian. Ah well, might as well flip through it, that is quite a nice picture…hmm, first page, first text I encounter*:
One of the obvious–and most enjoyable–fringe benefits of QDMA management is the opportunity to view and hunt adult bucks. Watching a buck that you passed up a shot on as a 1-1/2 year old grow into something special is a common experience for QDMA practitioners. Whether you harvest the buck or not is rarely as important as just knowing he’s living on your property!
AUGH!
“HARVEST“?
…It’s rare that I come up against such a different frame of mind in my reading that I find myself so completely horrified while realizing that someone else (some typical person, not a serial killer reading a thriller or something) might be reading along nodding with a smile on his/her face. (Is it bad that I really wanted to leave it at “his” to keep some distance?)
Okay, let’s take this sentence by sentence:
- Starts sane, then suddenly we’re at “view and hunt adult bucks” and you realize that the “obvious fringe benefit” that the person was including you in (as though you were think-alike buddies) is KILLING THINGS. What? And then there’s the double take of “Holy shit, they said ‘adult bucks’ as though the usual was to kill ‘em as calves or adolescents!” They made it sound like killing them before they’re adults is business as usual, not the special treat of killing the adults! And of course that is because they rarely get the chance to grow into adults, as hunters slaughter them before then!
- Honestly, I am having trouble putting the deep disturbance that this second sentence stirred in me into words. I mean, a) they are holding up the experience of “Gee, that buck grew into something special! I’m glad I didn’t murder it years ago!” as a really cool thing…like way out of the ordinary that you’d be glad you hadn’t killed something…b) I have this sense that the cool experience they’re alluding to is not “Gee, I’m glad I didn’t kill it!” but instead, “Gee, I’m glad I didn’t kill it YET! Take aim!” c) Watching something “grow into something special” to me has a VERY STRONG CONNOTATION of watching a CHILD grow into a SPECIAL PERSON. To use those words to describe watching a living creature mature into something you can harvest–AUGH, I have no words!
- HARVEST THE BUCK!?!?!?!?!?!?
I am having trouble getting past “harvest” as applied to a creature that will struggle and bleed all over you. But if I did get over it enough (HARVEST THE BUCK!!!!?????!??????!?!!!!????) to analyze the sentiments in that sentence, I might (HARVEST! HARVEST! THE BUCK! HARVEST!) be completely staggered by the disgusting arrogance of the apparent feeling that “he’s living on your property” (as though human property divisions were at all applicable to other creatures!)…well, it sounds like “having” the buck living on “your” property and being happy about it (a feeling I can relate to, minus the appropriatory** tone… “Cool, there’s a gorgeous animal living nearby!”) is supposed to be *almost* as good as having a HARVESTED BUCK ON YOUR WALL.
I am so completely horrified by contact with this totally alien (not the friendly aliens that kids in an adventure novel might meet and get help from–I am talking horror movie aliens) mindset! There went my good mood! And my hunting-virgin mind! AUGH!
…I seem to remember saying something when describing my stance as a vegetarian, something like, “It’s one thing to hunt food you need for survival, and another to lock generations of sentient creatures in horror-movie factory farms.”
I think I will have to be VERY careful to EXCLUDE exoneration of THIS kind of “I own the world” mentality hunting from any such comments I make in the future!
AUGH!
*Yes, it’s an ad.
**Yes, I made that up.
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3 minutes later:
I just scanned 2 more pages and OH MY SPATULA WHY DID I DO THAT. AH! EEEK! The really really scary part is the TONE! And the attitude of “Woohoo, I drew a tag for a rare oryx depredation hunt in the San Andreas Wildlife Refuge, now I get to kill something exotic, look how long these horns are!” The, “Look what I killed!” I mean, I have seen cultures this scary invented in fantasy books and if I saw this in a novel, I’d be like “Oh my god, they thought of everything, some people in this culture scorn hunting on public land, they argue about the amount of meat vs. the ‘cool antler’ trophies, this seems so real!” Only, it’s real! It’s a real live horror that I know have to live with the knowledge of! AUGH!
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1 more minute later:
OH MY GOD THEY DID NOT! OH MY GOD THEY DID NOT!
Take a film canister, glue a clothespin to the outside, and stuff a cotton ball inside. Pour in your doe urine, and let the cotton absorb the urine. Then, simply clip the canister to a tree limb near your treestand. After the hunt, simply snap the cap back on and hit the trail. This has worked for me more times than I can count. It’s small enough to keep in your pocket, and it won’t spill.
They use DOE PEE to give the deer families the sense of security that comes from feeling like mom or wife was relaxed here! And then they wrote it out in the style of directions for craft projects that you’d design for 10-year-olds!
AUGH!
1 response so far ↓
mom // October 24, 2009 at 8:51 pm |
I logged on this evening, wondering if you had added anything lately, and there it was, your disturbing, very Meghan, commentary. There is nothing to add. Except, why do I eat meat?
And, I had just been horseback riding in the high desert wonderland of New Mexico, closed to nature and beast. Riding a fine animal (a Tennessee walker) through the cottonwood trees dressed in their gold fall finery. Hunting does seem alien.
given this background of horror at hunting, You can imagine me biting my tongue tonight as I sat through an entire flight beside a man (again the gender thing) avidly reading each page of some militia weapons magazine. Oddly this was while I was reading two articles discussing Obama’s developing policy in Afghanistan punctuated with accounts of the multiple sucicide bomber attacks this month in Pakistan, as well as the stockpiling of weapons by the Taliban using poppy seed money. The horror of gunning down young (or old) does is enough, without envisioning young brainwashed boys outfitted as soldiers for Allah driven to “righteous ” killing in His name. I just don’t know sometimes.
Sadly, in my own small minded way, the only sense of justice that I could see was that this same (gun magazine) gentleman had, absolutely, hands down, the ugliest nose I have ever witnessed. No word of a lie, no hyberbole. I had seen him in the airport earlier, and was actually revulsed by a long pointed crooked globular appendage whose Cerano de Bergnac (sp) crossed with a wicked witch shape was surpassed by the texture of craters and warty growths colored by varying exposure to sun or heat or smoke or fire or a combination of all of the above, finished off with the vascular proliferation and dilitation peculiar to frequent imbibers in alcohol (think WC Fields as a baseline). Finally add the patchy coloration and surface uniqe to skin that has every stigmata of the oily (sheen and grease), the dry (patchy flaking of red and white dander), and the porous (no amount of product could shrink these pores) , peppered with sebum clogs and black plugs. Yes, he sat in the seat beside me and I actually thought I might be unable to look at him up close. And then he opens his urban warrior magazine..