Tuesday, July 12, 2011

recreational killing

My boss is going on vacation the end of the week. Since he always goes to Vermont in August, I had no idea where on earth he thought he was going in July. Alaska, it turns out. That's awesome, I opined.

"Eh. We're going to see my brother-in-law."

"Does that make it not awesome?"

"He's alright."

Said alright brother-in-law lives way out in the boonies. Moose wander into his backyard. I opined again that that was awesome.

"He likes to shoot them. Well, I don't know if he necessarily shoots the ones in his yard, but he likes to shoot them."

"Him and Sarah Palin! Maybe you guys should shoot something from a helicoptor while you're out there."

"Poodles! We could shoot poodles from a helicoptor!"

(Oh, purse-dog lovers, relax. We do not really condone poodlecide and no yappy little canines were harmed in the making of this post.)

So, anyway, this got me to thinking about how much I do not understand the appeal of hunting, aka recreational killing. I understand people who are really poor hunting in order to eat what they kill. I saw Winter's Bone, all y'all. God. But I don't even understand people who hunt and eat what they kill when they don't absolutely have to. How is killing fun? (And don't we generally seek to lock up people who do think killing is fun?) If you want a challenge, there are lots of challenging endeavors that do not involve, y'know, carnage. If you want to commune with nature, likewise. And if you want to get your aggressions out, wouldn't you rather take up, like, MMA and hit actual people, not shoot Bambi's mother from a distance?

Yeah, I know, I know, city girl, blah blah freakin' blah.

xoxo


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Spending most of the last 10 days surrounded by some mighty juicy looking deer (and once a flock of really nasty looking wild turkeys) my search on whether deer was kosher reveals that 1) they are but 2) you can't hunt them because then they won't be killed according to kosher law. so thus can't be eaten.

Thus a big part of why my co-religionists are lousy hunters and not terribly interested in doing so. And, as much as I like meat (which I do) if I thought about it too much I'd probably be a pescovarian myself. So the thought of actually going out and killing an animal seems so wrong.

This, however, raises the question that I'm pretty sure David and others are depicted as hunters in the Tanakh, and I don't think they were just hunting 'shrooms. So how could they eat what they were hunting? I'll keep you posted.

malevolent andrea said...

You already started doing the research on this, huh? Was it really really boring in Tennessee when J was at work? hahahaha

Maybe there was some kind of biblical kosher hunting procedure. There probably still is, and your ignorant city boy/girl rabbis just don't know what it is!

P.S. Your kosher gf's cat was just trying to eat my son's ham sandwich.