Deer Jerky is Delicious

From the looks of it, it appears that every Monday morning someone shows up at my work with Sunday's paper, and then they proceed to have an epileptic fit which involves throwing the sales flyers around in all directions.  Every Monday night, we find the aftermath of this episode scattered all over the break room, and we all sit around thumbing through these flyers and having fairly insipid conversations about them until someone has the good sense to finally gather the whole mess up and throw it in the garbage.

This past Monday I came across a flyer for a sporting goods store which featured deals on several different hunting rifles, and I was struck by the fact that Deer Season is here again.  Even for a vegetative, indoorsy person like myself this fact is inescapable at this time of year in Northeast Ohio.  Plus, given the random proliferation of hunting magazines that pop up all over the shop, I'm guessing someone around there really has it in for the deer.  So I was looking through this flyer, and I made the off-handed remark that the way rednecks act about hunting always strikes me as "borderline psychotic", which I admit is a fairly exaggerated statement, and probably grossly unfair.  But then this woman that I work with that was there in the break room replied that it was "nature", which would have been the stupidest argument that I've ever heard for hunting, if she hadn't followed it up moments later with the notion that it's a "sport."

For the record, I eat meat.  I eat a lot of meat.  Three of my four basic food groups are meat, and the fourth one is whatever kind of animal fat that is that they deep fry Hostess Fruit Pies in.  So, I'm obviously in no position to get a holier-that-thou attitude about killing animals.  Any animal that sees me coming with a fork would be well advised to run the other way.  Also, I'm not so blinded by liberal outrage that I can't understand that hunting was once a necessity of human survival.  Food wasn't always neatly packed on Styrofoam trays, shrink-wrapped in plastic, and placed on display in the local supermarket.  You either grew it or hunted it, and there was even a time when the cultivation needed to grow food was beyond the range of humanity's mental horizons and the comfort of their living conditions.  There was a time when hunting was the only way to survive.

I suppose that an argument could even be made that hunting in the modern age is a way of passing a vital tradition down from generation to generation, a way of preserving a skill that could be needed if civilization ever collapsed and we were driven back to stalking the woods for our food.  I can see that.  There's something to be said for not surrendering completely to the comforts of a technological society, for keeping the gun loaded and the eye steady should the wolf reappear at the door.  I can almost even understand the mystical reverence that people like Ted Nugent have for the practice...almost.

However, I don't think that throwing the word "nature" at the subject is a valid argument.  What's natural about laser powered scopes and night vision goggles?  Is the fact that you're going out to the woods with your gear make the activity an inherent part of nature?  Is it natural because animals hunt one another?  Is it natural because our ancestors hunted?  Declaring that something is "nature" seems like a vast cop-out, as though it's something beyond argument or morality, something we're driven to do by our lower reptilian brain and our baser instincts.  Sorry, I don't buy that.  Civilization means, at the very least, an attempt to rise above these things, to curb these primitive impulses.  If we're going to start throwing out "nature" as an excuse for our actions we might as well strip down now and abandon the cities and return to the trees.

Arguing that it's a "sport" is an even bigger cop-out.  How does calling something a "sport" magically supersede the moral issues involved?  What exactly qualifies it as a "sport"?  I suppose the tracking requires a certain amount of skill that could be classified as sportsmanship, but other than that it's basically just picking up a gun and killing a defenseless animal.  It's a bizarre sport where the other team isn't aware that they're even playing, they never asked to play, they were never asked if the wanted to play, and their only notification that the game was on was a bullet between the eyes.  They don't even get endorsement deals!  Seriously though, even if an argument can be made that it is a sport, then it still seems to me like a lame point to raise against ethical objections.  "Well, it's a sport!", comes off pretty weak.

So, I can understand the idea of keeping the skills sharp, and I have no room to object to the idea of killing animals and eating the meat.  It's hard to argue that point with a roast beef sandwich in each hand.  I guess it all comes down to a sense that for some of these people it isn't about survival, or tradition, or even food.  For some of them it comes off as simply a twisted need to go out and kill something.  Still others seem to do it for some kind of masculine validation.  Either of these seem like pretty dickish reasons to go out and shoot an animal that was minding its own business.  At least, that's my opinion.