Call of the Wild and AOTW

The Monday after Thanksgiving is a special day in our family.  Okay, it's a special day for the men, and a day of not putting up with the shit of the men for the women.  For today is the first day of deer gun season in the great state of Ohio.  And while it's been five years since I've been out there (kids and the Succubus), I still love to step out in the morning and mentally be back on the side of the hill.

Not today, as I had to shove coats on the kids and it was nut-icing cold.  Mind you, it's colder in the woods.  Usually, it's shortly after the sun comes up that the shivers set in.  And it's little things like that that make hunting what it is:  a series of experiences that connect Man with a part of himself that we too often lose in the daily grind of modern life.  Things like the cycles of nature.  The perilous nature of life in the wild.  How we get meat.

The last is most important, as we too often forget that for us to eat meat, we must kill animals to do it.  Hunting is the most organic way possible to get that meat. Ask Ted Nugent.  We get life from the life of the animal.  We kill the animal, remove the organs, skin it, process it into a storable form.  Then, as we do with meat from the store, we cook it and eat it.  And it is in understanding that process that we value that meat more.  In fact, since I was young, one rule was that we ate all the meat.  We may throw other stuff to the dogs, but the meat went into our bellies (with the notable exception of some 20-year-old cockfighting rooster meat we once had that only got tender after maybe 6 hours of cooking).

And it is an advantage growing up in the country.  We butchered chickens.  I vividly remember the fun of watching a headless chicken run around fountaining blood.  Then there was the pig we raised.  We named it bacon.  Want to guess what happened to him?  Then there was the time our dog had a big litter of puppies.  Well, I can say that they were not eaten, but I had to mention them so you wondered if we had fresh young hot dogs (bad pun I know) that winter.  Not that I'm opposed to trying dog, just not in this country because we don't raise them for food.  Although the last time I had Chinese....  The point is that I was never under any illusions about where meat came from.  This I will pass on to my kids.

I could go on about the good for the environment and for those game animals that hunters provide (like birth control, right), but that's what the comment section (and appropriate links) is for.  Plus, it's almost Tuesday and I really need to wrap up my hunting post.



And since the closest I'm going to get to deer this week (unless one runs across the road in front of me) is the TV screen:

Bambi is Asshat of the Week!

Like fellow AOTW Smokey Bear, the "beloved" Disney character has significant flaws.  In this area though, Bambi is the misrepresentation of Man.  I've been through this in the past, but let me quote from that post:

I understand why people who have never hunted or have never associated with hunters have a distasteful view of hunting. This is best reflected in the Disney movie, Bambi. The portrait of Man in that movie was as an infection, disturbing the peace of the woods by their evil presence. Then with a roar of death, they let loose a barrage of gunfire, brutally snuffing out Bambi's mom. Then, to top off their murderous spree, they set fire to the forest through sheer indifference. Damn, even I despise these assholes.

Of course, that's the point. These are not the average hunters. They're assholes.

While I enjoy the occasional Disney film now and then (3-year-old girl, Tinkerbell movies have been on the Disney channel both last night AND today, she wears her fairy wings from Halloween regularly, nuff said?), Disney has a bad habit of investing every damned animal in all their movies (with the exception of rare evil animals) with annoying dough eyes.  In essence, it invests children, and consequently adults, with the concept that animals are people too.  Ask anyone who really works with animals if they're people too. 

So unless your religious faith included a belief that people's souls are reincarnated in animals, and therefore you're killing people when you kill an animal (just covering the Krishna angle), you're falling for Disney asshattery.