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I'm thankful for having the right to blog about anything I want. Sometimes blogging gets me motivated. But tonight it's just a diversion from touching up my P2. I've decided I'll never be an editor because, well, I don't like editing. It's just not very enjoyable. I accept my imperfections, even in things I seek to be perfect at, like writing... and I'm OK with that. If I ever fulfill my dream of writing a book, I'll be sure to have an editor with more enthusiasm than I.... But I digress and now comes the machismo topic of hunting.
Below, the image demonstrates the superficiality of hunting as well as the pseudo-sport aspects that are implied by societies that embrace trophy hunting as a so-called "sport".
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Taxidermy
So I was reading Cat's blog, as I do most other E 379 blogs, and I was a bit surprised. It would seem even the most non-threatening people among us are guilty of killing an animal for sport. First, let me clarify. Like Cat, I'm not casting stones. In fact, I ate meat loaf today which will definitely yield some negative points towards my Karma. Even further than this, I have killed many animals for sport. The most significant to the topic of hunting, being doves and fishes.
The first time I legally went dove hunting was in high school during my freshman year. Before this, I terrorized many animals with my pellet gun. Looking back at the experience makes me rethink why I even had the desire to hunt, because hunting does not make sense to me any longer. The reason I hunted was for the high. Honestly, killing birds made me feel superior. I knew this from my days sneaking up on woodpeckers with my pellet gun in the pasture where I grew up. Yet viewing this feeling from an introspective standpoint makes me see how superficial the feeling really was, which brings me to my memories of hunting.
Hunting is like a video tape in my mind. When I think about it I get high on the vividness of the imagery that the memory in my brain is still able to recall. The vividness is so clear, it staggers my sensations into submission. My feelings succumb to the images and I see how wrong I was for feeling the way I did when I killed an animal for "sport".
The first picture I'm able to recount in my mind involving hunting occurred during a time when I was eleven years old. I was fishing with my childhood friend Darren, who ironically is now a veterinarian. We were walking up to the old farm house where Darren grew up. As we were walking, his uncle asked us if we wanted to ride along in the truck for some hunting. His uncle had obviously had a few beers. He said in a macho voice, "does your friend have any qualms about hunting? If so, we can drop him off at the house." Darren looked at me, then back his uncle and let out a chuckle as if I had spoken for myself.
We drove along the fence line. The uncle rested his shotgun over his left forearm so that it laid across the hand he used to hold his beer. The butt of the gun rested against his beer belly while he steered the truck with his right hand. We bounced along the pasture as a Jack rabbit crept out of the tall weeds growing along the fence. First it was just a scurry to another hiding place. Then the rabbit took off as if he'd been discovered. Before it was able to cross the fence line, we had the rabbit in shotgun range. One shot was all it took for the rabbit to stop in its tracks. But it was not yet dead.
This portion of the picture in my memory is the most disturbing. The rabbit squirmed and wrestled with itself on the ground as it faced its death in the most unsightly manner. It thrashed itself about, and let out screeching squeals of wretched anguish as it begged for our mercy. Yet the three of us just stood there while the uncle drank his beer and seemed to enjoy the power he had over the rabbit. But this gruesome scene did not stop me from becoming a hunter.
Looking back, I had never liked watching animals suffer. I knew this from an experience in grade school when I tattled on the school bully for ripping a frog apart and sticking the mutilated body parts down his shirt.... I could not make sense of the frog being killed for entertainment and the rabbit was no different. It seemed like an hour before the uncle finally put the bunny out of its misery. Needless to say, I was not impressed. Yet I was impressed about hunting somewhere along the line. Otherwise, I would not be able to write about my own experiences with killing animals.
My desire to hunt probably came from several impressions. I grew up around a lot of "agriculture types" who hunted as sort of a lifestyle. I reckoned the camouflaged attire was pretty cool. It seemed a lot of my friends wore camouflage to school even (if that gives you any scope of how redneck I grew up). I watched television shows which glorified hunting. And I admired the taxidermy that hung on the walls of almost every place I visited during my youth. According to Victorian animal rights author Harriet Ritvo,
Maintaining the integrity of the remains was only the first step worthy of producing a prize worthy of public display. To present an effective symbol of the hunters' heroic apporopriation, a trophy needed to evoke the aspect of the animal that had provoked and justified the killing. Thus many intrinsically impressive specimens emerged as inferior trophies because of failures in taxidermic interpretation or transformation. Often, according to one connoisseur, "graceful outlines. . . expressive attitudes, and . . . sleek , glossy coat" turned into a "stiff, gaunt, distorted form. . . with its round staring eyes, its withered ears, lips and nostrils
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Hunting is deeply embedded into Texas culture and is portrayed as a macho or manly thing to do. So, of course, I hunted to impress my friends and then I really started to enjoy the thrill of the hunt. Soon, I became like Orwell wrote about shooting the elephant in Shooting an Elephant, "and in every so crisis he has got to do what the natives expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant." [3]
We joked about hunting a lot of times. We came up with sayings that were only funny to us, such as teenage boys do. We knew the dove ran in pairs, so we'd say, "where there's one there's two". Or we'd sing "for your dove" or "I got nothing but dove for you". At the end of the day, whoever had the most dead doves won the competition. Admittedly, there was a peaceful aspect to hiding out, waiting quietly for the dove to come while our sight was peeled for flying birds. Crouched like tigers, we'd wait for them to fly over and at the bang of a gun they'd fall from the sky like rain. I hunted for about 5 years straight, but it's nothing I would want to do again.
Had there been anything worthwhile gained from killing the doves, I might be able to justify my acts. But since dove yield very little edible meat unless you kill several of them, dove hunting remains pointless to me. When I consider large animals that produce more meat, I still can't make any sense of hunting. Not only do hunters have to kill the animal, they also have to butcher it, which is no joyous task. I know because often times, I'd shoot a dove an it would not be dead. Rather than wasting more ammo or ruining meat, I'd grab the dove by the head and fling its body off its head with my bear hands. The dove's head would remain in my palm as the body flapped away from me on the ground. And every time, no matter how clean the kill, we still had to skin the dove which we did more so for the ritualistic aspect of dismembering birds amongst our fellow hunters. Oh, the pleasure involved in THAT ritual leaves me wondering what I ever enjoyed about this.
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And I'm left wondering why humans take pleasure in asserting their power over other animals' lives? Why do we take pleasure in hunting? At what point do we set our own standard of morality and rise above the barbaric practices of old? When does society learn the lesson of its pointless practices of hunting? Do we remain passive to the superficiality of our reality? Or do we remain lost in what we perceive as being real?
My thoughts can't make any sense of why we enjoy it. I can't make any sense of why I enjoyed it. In fact, I can't make sense of hunting other than it's an innately important survival mechanism. Nothing more, nothing less. Today, most of us don't need to hunt at all to survive. But that won't stop people from doing it for the sport of it or for the ritual in it. Nor will it change the fact that while I freely criticize the practice of hunting, that I myself have hunted, and I ate meatloaf--just today.
Hunting Hypocrisy
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Works Cited
[0]http://bestanimations.com/Animals/Birds/Doves/Doves.html
[1]http://seemikedraw.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/hunting-trophy.gif
[2]Course anthology, 418
[3]Course anthology, 441
[4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD8qb9koXf0
[5]http://www.michigandaily.com/files/Hunting1118.jpg
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