hunting and fishing

[joanna bujes]

At 01:45 PM 02/14/2003 -0500, Gar wrote:
>When I lived in Texas, a couple I knew lived mostly by hunting and
>fishing and foraging - combined with casual labor. He hunted deer and
>quail and pheasants, and I suspect other game that was not entirely
>legal. He fished, and gathered wild roots and greens. They both
>gardened, and gathered firewood. (They had electricity and running
>water, but depended entirely on wood for heat. And they lived without
>air conditioning, which in the Houston area would have driven me out of
>state a lot sooner than I left.)  They produced a lot of their own
>goods. But there is no way they could have lived on as little as they
>made without the supplemetation of hunting. Now I supposed they could
>have been all po-faced and mournful about it. "Oh what a pity that I
>have to take the lives of innocent animals to live."  But in fact they
>enjoyed hunting and fishing, and great deal of the other stuff they did.
>And were in fact among the most cheerful people I knew. And really, why
>shouldn't they have taken as much joy in their livss as possible? How
>was this wrong?

I don't see how it's wrong. One of my earliest jobs was lab assistant for 
an ob/gyn research lab. Part of my job involved the collection of bovine 
uterine tissue (cow uteruses). In order to do this, I had go to the LA 
slaughterhouses and collect uteruses (after the cows were killed and during 
the process of butchering). I think if I were an animal, I would prefer to 
be hunted than killed at a slaughterhouse. The animals were brought in on 
trucks and corralled near the slaughterhouse before being killed. There 
were thousands and thousands of animals, waiting, smelling the blood and 
the fear and the death of the animals that had already been killed. The 
noises they made were unmistakably mournful and fearful. I don't think it 
was as easy a death as being suddenly shot, out of the blue, as in hunting. 
Also, when hunted, the animal actually has a fighting chance...to run, to 
hide: the territory is one he knows. At a slaughterhouse, the chances are 
all with the hunters; the animal can't run away.

As Gar says, you can choose to eat meat or not. I still do. But it's 
ridiculous to brand hunters as "barbaric" given our own practices. But 
"trophy" hunting is inexcusable.

Joanna