"I've kilt over 200 deer", said the Bowbarian with a twanging bravado that made my guts tighten. "Really", was the only response I could muster. The irony of my situation could almost compensate for my growing frustration and anger. It was I who held the hole card, and the bluff. But here was this brutal animal killer, a cowardly bushwhacker, who I was riding alongside, and I was a former vice president of the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting. How splendid this irony! And it was making me sick.
I suppose I could have immediately called him out, revealed my reputation for publicly taking on hunters and their entrenched "game" officials in the agencies, or their official pimps, their "biostitutes".
I could've let him have it about the lies and propaganda used by the hunter-controlled Virginia Game and Fish Commission (simply plug in your own state here) to protect hunting interests.
I could have shared with him the awful facts about bow hunting, its ineffectiveness, its primitive inaccuracy, and inherent cruelty. How studies such as the one conducted by the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife found that bow hunting carries a remarkable 50% "hit/loss" rate, a dreadful statistic revealing how up to half of all animals struck with a hunter's razor-tipped, "broadhead" arrow, escape wounded, to die slow linger deaths from hemorrhaging blood loss and septic infection. Johnny had admitted "losing" one just last season.
I would have told him how commission game programs are all designed to propagate more target animals for the gun, for sport and trophies (some promoting bloodsports for children 5 years of age!), and not for genuine wildlife conservation and the preservation of life-preserving biological diversity, all science and understanding critical to our and the planet's long term survival.
No, I didn't believe Johnny the Deer Slayer would be at all receptive to my point of view. I honestly felt he would have dropped me and my Ford right back on the side of the road.
But he clearly felt comfortable sharing his experiences killing hundreds of wild animals. I thought, doesn't he understand that many people today find sport hunting offensive? Where the hell has he been for the last 25 years? I know for a fact many people believe gunning down a bear or a wolf for sport and a trophy is offensive. Most people I talk to find killing a Grizzly to make a rug for the trophy den a highly repugnant act. And most people, at least those that claim a love of Nature and the environment, believe that chasing wild animals like cougars with hounds, often outfitted with radio-collared tracking equipment, and "treeing" the helpless, frightened animals and shooting them point blank range, is a cowardly and despicable act.
I did find it interesting that all of this cowardly, immoral behavior is precisely what ex-Gov and VP contender Sarah Palin likes to brag about doing in Alaska. We didn't hear too much of an outcry over that though because of complete media mendacity. Because as many of us know the media is the message and the message, that being one of hunting cruelty, simply wasn't going to be discussed.
There is one thing I really wished I had asked; "Will the day ever come when hunters hang up their weapons and stop killing?"
To me, that day has come and gone.
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