Cuddly Baby Giraffes, or Something Like That

Gosh...my last post seems to have disappeared from Facebook...probably a technical glitch...LOL! So here it is on the Blog. Hey Facebook...Happy Independence Day, you fascist bastards!

You probably know I unconditionally support Tess Thompson Talley in this manufactured controversy, as I support all forms of legal hunting. I also feel for her, coming off the hunt of her life, to be made to endure a social media lynching.

It's especially poignant for me, since I just returned last Friday from the hunting trip of my life, the Cape Buffalo, I hunted in South Africa. I guess a Cape Buffalo isn't cute enough to qualify for outrage (or, maybe since I'm already Great Satan, it's more effort than it's worth to make me Mo' Greater Satan).

I tend to think a lot about hunting after my various hunting trips. I'm especially curious about how we as hunters lost the philosophical center of our own argument. I see an analogy with the earlier days of our 2A fights. If one goes back to, say, the late 1960s/earlier 70s, our blood enemies, most notably Handgun Control Inc., had successes in driving wedges into our culture — hunters against shooters, shotgunners against handgunners, everybody against .50 BMGs, cop-killer bullets, Saturday Night Specials, etc.

What changed on the 2A front was that our leaders, especially such visionaries as Ronnie Barrett, Mike Phifer, Sandy Froman, Larry Keane and others, essentially solidified the culture over a simple (and often unstated) premise — All guns are the same; an attack on one is an attack on all. And we've done pretty well making that stick.

Hunting culture is all over the board, and it is being driven in all sorts of directions by ostensibly pro-hunting organizations, loud factions of the market (meat vs. trophy, bow vs. firearm, crossbow vs. everything, fair chase vs. fenced, etc.), and quite honestly, the hunting media, including the flood of hunting television (mea culpa, kids).

As we saw in the 2A battles, factions try to insulate themselves from attack by turning on their own...e.g. "Don't eat ME! I'm the GOOD ONE! Eat those OTHER GUYS first!"

Perhaps our biggest mistake as hunters (and this is in my own humble opinion; YMMV), was ceding the philosophical high ground to our enemies, especially by not calling out (as a group) the essential core hypocrisy of our enemies. An example...how is Ms. Talley's giraffe different from a Big Mac? I would contend that there is no difference — both are, to be blunt, dead meat.

I would also contend that, hell, at least the giraffe had a life, and apparently a long and exciting life, compared to the factory farm-produced cattle that ended up covered in McDonald's Special Sauce.

What is the difference between a cuddly baby panda and the pack rat I trapped and killed yesterday? What is the difference between your Thanksgiving turkey and your pet dog? Aren't they all animals, God's creatures if you will, deserving of the same respect. Or is respect based solely on cuteness and proximity?

Granted, those are extreme examples, but if you think about it, the differences are all subjective and often based on cultural considerations. Anyone who eats meat, wears any kind of leather and uses animal derived products AND continues to oppose hunting of ANY kind is a rank hypocrite. And should be attacked as such.

In fact (to me) any kind of parsing of the killing of animals is both artificial and completely subjective. Whether it is the ground beef used by a fast food chain, the hot dog you ate at the last baseball game you attended, a trophy sheep from Somewhereistan, your newest motorcycle jacket, venison steaks in your freezer, or the cosmetics you use to make yourself really hot hot hot, you are directly involved in the killing and consumption of animals. There is no difference, aside from ignorance or willful selective blindness.

Our continued existence on this planet is based on killing, the Great Circle of Life...even DISNEY, the first monumental anthropomorphizer of animals great and small, got it! Be vegan all you want and enjoy that tofu...I'm a Southern boy who grew up next to big soybeans fields...killing that happens as a secondary side-effect of factory farming is, to my thinking, still killing; that is, the animal still ends up dead. Explaining that you neither consume nor use animal products is, once again, a function of ignorance and willful blindness.

Just some thoughts...and BTW, we're all going to die, and in the end something will eat us. That's the way it works, Simba!