On Hunting

“They take unbelievable pleasure in the hideous blast of the hunting horn and baying of the hounds. Dogs dung smells sweet as cinnamon to them.”
-- Desiderius Erasmus

It’s my belief that I could make an entire career out of walking through a bookstore and piling up the completely inane and ludicrous books that are put into print. From the Nascar Library Collection (the greatest oxymoron I have yet to discover) to “How to Become a Millionaire the Lord’s Way” (nepotism, naturally). When I’m fortunate enough to escape the register, I routinely stroll the aisles looking for my next read or, in most cases, next eye roll.

Tonight I came upon a collection of deer hunting books. On the cover, a gruff, homely man in camouflage held aloft the limp head of a six-point deer. The buck’s eyes were glazed over and its purple tongue dangled out of one corner of its mouth. The proud hunter grinned with such masculine pride that I can only assume they had to air brush anything below his belt buckle.

The picture reminded me how much I didn’t understand the modern hunter. Back in the day when bling meant leopard pelts, life necessitated the hunt. If you didn’t hunt, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t eat, you hung out with Paris Hilton. But at some point in the evolution of mankind our advances in agriculture and maintaining livestock diminished the need for the manliest of the species to scratch their asses in the bushes waiting for that prize buck to come over the hill. Suddenly, scratching one’s ass in the bushes became recreation.

With a mind gifted for psychological deconstruction, I’ve tried to understand what drives millions of grown men to rise at the crack of down, throw on their Sunday-best camo, pack up a small arsenal of weapons, and then sit in a box of sticks for hours. Is it a return to those golden years before the development of our frontal lobes? Is it a superiority complex, a quest to best the dazzling array of creatures they confront on a weekly basis? Clearly it must be something more than the concussion of their boomsticks. Having never hunted, I can’t be certain.

If any of these are the correct reasons, the hunters out there have not fully committed to their motivations. An abundance of homes throughout the country display the spoils of these patriarchal (or step-patriarchal I would imagine) expeditions into the wild. These heads and pelts always struck me as absurd trophies, rewards of decidedly lop-sided battles. It’s kind of like Carl Lewis taking pride in sweeping the Special Olympics. With the array of artillery at the disposal of modern hunters, they have a decided advantage over their furry adversaries.

In a way, I have no real prejudice against the practice of hunting, but merely the pride of accomplishment in outwitting the dimwitted. The idiom “deer in headlights” did not come out of the clear blue sky. One witnesses a degradation of brain function when this spell sets in. When you see a friend with their jaw hung open, eyes wide, frozen in place, that friend is clearly operating at less than full intellectual capacity. So, why do so many hunters have deer heads prominently displayed in their living rooms? They tricked a baser creature with their wiles. Wow. And I can make an infant believe I pulled a quarter out of his ear. Talk about a deer in headlights. Those kids have no clue.

But I digress.

Unlike much of the pontificating I do on this site, I offer a solution; a way hunters can reach back to those days before agrarian society stole their thunder and bag a creature in a way that celebrates the alpha male in all of them.

Let’s go old school. Let’s make it fair. Strip yourselves of all those newfangled gadgets that have stacked the decks so far in your favor that it’s become the greatest of David and Goliath situations – if David was also retarded.

Start with the camo. No more spending hundreds of dollars on cozy, warm jackets and pants, no. It’s time to improvise. Get out and roll in the dirt. Stick some leaves to your ass. If warmth is an issue, well, you’ll just have to wait until you bag that first deer or, if you’ve been a good boy or girl, bear. Skin that sucker and wrap it around you tight. That’s how your great ancestors used to do it. You disrespect their memory with your wool lining and water-resistant boots.

Second, let’s stop trying to outsmart the animals. No more decoys or other contraptions to make the prey think they’re coming to a cocktail party. No more of those manufactured scents meant to lure the males to their doom. How would you like it if you got invited to a Hollywood premiere by a beautiful woman only to get shot in the ass with a graphite-shafted arrow? It’s just rude. Besides, if we’re going to embrace the old school and you want the scent of a female deer, by God, you’re going to get it the old-fashioned way.

Finally, and most importantly, let’s talk weaponry. I have no respect for a hunter who takes out a deer with a bow that could shoot an arrow through a Buick. Talk about overkill. Plus, I know there are hunters out there with laser sights and super-zooms (or at least that’s what the NRA would have us believe), and is that really sporting? Give me a hunter who bashed a deer’s head in with a rock and I’ll shake his hand. He can throw that carcass over his shoulder and walk down Main Street and I’ll follow him like a troubadour, hailing his virtues in song. Imagine the pride you would feel seeing your husband or father walking into the living room scratched all to hell, clutching his ribs, bleeding internally, but dragging the furry mass of a bear behind him. I for one would stand up and proclaim “There’s a real man!”

I’m just talking fairness folks. There’s nothing fair about the modern hunter. It’s high time to strip off the excess and get back to the roots of the contest between man and beast. It’ll better us as people, and it might help diminish that white trash population that won this last presidential election. If nothing else, I’m certain the ratings for the Outdoor Living Network will go through the roof.