Not long ago, driven by morbid curiosity, I picked up a copy of a magazine called Field & Stream. For someone who likes animals as much as I do, this kind of publication evokes the kind of nauseated fascination that one might feel while reading a newsletter from a Nazi concentration camp. First you confront the fact that there are people who do this kind of thing, then you realize that they actually enjoy it!Most of the articles in the issue I read dealt with fishing. Judging from the accompanying photographs, fishing seems to attract overweight men with bad teeth. They appeared to be having a good time, which is how I learned about their dentition. It was harder to tell how the fish felt about their role, but I'm going to guess that drowning in air isn't much fun, especially after being dragged from the water with a hook. This was a common theme throughout the magazine: hunting and fishing are distinctly one-sided activities.
After reading the fishing reports, I figured I could handle anything that Field and Stream might throw at me. That was before I encountered a one-page article entitled "Knockdown Power." Its author, David Petzal, began by lamenting the time he wasted in high school memorizing data on the muzzle velocity, shot weight, and kinetic energy of various types of ammunition. (I picture a sullen, pimply faced youngster, backpack stuffed with gun magazines, striding silently along school hallways, while girls giggle and whisper. Maybe at Columbine?)
Eventually young Petzal found a role model: his predecessor in the column that I was now reading, a man named Warren Page. According to Petzal, Warren had "killed more animals than I had dreamed of." This evidently passes for flattery among readers of Field and Stream. What wisdom did this paragon impart to his idealistic protégé? According to Petzal it was "the dirty secret that no projectile actually takes an animal off its feet." Petzal illustrates this revelation with examples from his own experience. Quoth he, "I killed … I killed … I killed ... ." Get the idea?
Well, no. You can’t truly understand something like this without subjecting yourself to the gory details. So here’s Petzal on shooting a deer. For those of you who didn’t spend your high school years as profitably as he did, I've looked up the number in the quotation: ".270" is the weight of a bullet in grains. Now back to the deer.
A few years ago I killed a white-tail doe with a .270 that entered the rib cage on the left side and ranged forward to exit the right shoulder, breaking it in the process, and demolished both lungs and the heart. The bullet almost cut the poor creature in half but did not knock it down. That doe ran for 70 yards.
"Good taste," Petzal continues primly, "Constrains me from going on, because good taste is everything to me." (I swear, I didn’t make that up!) If you're wondering where there's any evidence of good taste in this passage, I can only suggest that it consists in Petzal's referring to an animal that he nearly cut in half as a "poor creature." This is the only hint to be found anywhere in the article that Petzal has any conception of what animals may experience, when he pulls the trigger. In the caption of a photograph showing a magnificent bull moose (alive, as it happens) he reveals that these animals "don’t react to bullet impact. They look bitter and resentful for a while, then keel over."
Bitter?
Resentful?
For non-hunters the callousness and brutality implicit in this "sport" may be hard to credit without actually reading a magazine like Field and Stream, but a word of caution is in order. If you’ve previously bought into the hunting community’s propaganda, that animals don’t suffer, when they're shot, that they die quickly, or that hunters rarely miss, prepare to be disabused. Among their own, hunters are more honest. Even presumably "good" shots routinely describe wounding animals, which survive for minutes or even hours afterwards. Some manage to elude a second shot altogether. Many of these animals die from blood loss or infection. Others succumb to thirst, or starve, or fall prey to carnivores.
And some, terribly mutilated, live on for years. I remember a beautiful little doe who lived for several seasons in the woods behind my house in Virginia. A hunter’s bullet had crushed her shoulder – the scar was still visible – and her leg, limp and shrunken, dangled pathetically whenever she moved. She’d managed somehow to reach the protected environment around Great Falls Park, but life must have been difficult for her even there. It broke my heart to watch her limp slowly after the other deer, as they bounded away through the forest.
For some reason hunters are immune to such feelings or at least are able to turn them on and off at will. They seem to regard wild animals as mere things, devoid of fear, untouched by agony, that have been placed in the woods for their amusement. Their ability to distance themselves from the horrors that they inflict resembles what soldiers do in warfare. The process of extinquishing sympathy by redefinition is called "depersonalization." Thus hunters, who often enjoy warm, loving relationships with their dogs, can without the slightest compunction put a bullet through an inoffensive creature that differs in no crucial respect from their canine buddies.
How do they do this? I have no idea, but I’m bothered by the similarity between this kind of emotional disconnection and that shown by mass murderers and other sociopaths. Although hunters and the organizations that represent them vehemently dispute this, there is evidence for a link between childhood hunting experiences and various types of violent crime.
In the long run none of this may matter. According to recent statistics, hunters today constitute a dwindling minority in the United States as well as in Europe. While I may not live long enough to see it, I rejoice to think that someday this repulsive activity and the ugly periodicals that celebrate it will disappear from the planet. It can't happen too soon.
