A few years ago, a relative of mine was visiting his sister in a Midwestern college town. The sister and her husband have done well. They have two lovely children and would be considered upper middle class. The husband is an entrepreneur and a developer. The sister and kids are athletic.
My relative is an accomplished woodsman, hunter, and shooter and he’s not above a play on words or a practical joke. He shares an opinion with Thomas Jefferson: ball games do not impress him. He followed Jefferson’s advise on exercise:
“…I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independance to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.”1
He taught his children how to shoot at an early age and their home is on the edge of a semi-wilderness area. Bears in the yard are not uncommon. The garden has to be protected from deer and rabbits. Wolves roam nearby.
While visiting, my relative accompanied his sister to a local soccer practice. The kids were playing and the half dozen other soccer moms were in conversation. One of them attempted to include him, asking if he had children. He said he did.
How many? “A boy and a girl.”
She politely asked, Do your kids play soccer?
“No,” he said, “they don’t play soccer.”
Do they play basketball?
“No, they don’t play basketball.”
Do they play baseball?
“No,” he said, “they don’t play baseball.”
By this time the other soccer moms were interested and were listening intently to the exchange.
The questioner asked, finally, What do your kids do?
The brother said, nonchalantly, deadpan, and with a slight shrug, as if it were of no particular interest, “They kill stuff.”
Six jaws dropped toward the ground. The sister, with only the slightest hesitation, exclaimed, “They’re hunters! They hunt!”
The sister’s children are also accomplished hunters and her husband hunts as well.
Part of hunting is killing. Killing used to be an understood necessity. All of society understood the necessity a hundred, or even sixty years ago.
I told an 88-year-old friend, who tends toward the liberal side in her politics and who lives in the same mid-western college town, about the exchange which happened more than a decade ago. She burst out laughing. We discussed it and she said she found it to be hilarious.
As a retired nurse, she understood the realities of life and death very well. Her husband had been a hunter, a soldier, a musician, had a B.A. in music, and had stopped just short of an M.A. in music to be a professional meat cutter. It paid a lot better.
The older generations had a far better understanding of basic realities than current ones do.
©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
I always tell people that plants are living things, too…
most things that live eat other things that live (or lived)…that’s the nature of things…
feed your cat or dog a vegan diet? definitely NOT natural for them…
The single least likely thing a lion is ever apt to think about is how to dispatch you as humanely as possible before eating you.
About all cats play with their food. Some Dogs do as well.
Dogs are omnivores in the wild. They’ll eat whatever they need to to survive.
Yeah, I have to go outside and murder my lawn in a few minutes. All this rain has caused it to grow.
Doesn’t sound like murder, sounds more like torture. You’re going to cut that poor living creature just because it doesn’t look the way you want it to look. Seems extremely bigoted to me. You probably feed it with those chemical ridden feeds to make it appear healthy, but in the end, you’re no different than those corporations pushing GMO’s.
/sarc
Rant finished.
You animal! Grass has feelings too!
Hell tell a caveman that, lol.
Man the times they are a changin. Its too bad the leftarted , lib……., aren’t aware ! I would like it if these so called MEN had to actually take up a rifle and go hunt for a meal ! It would be nice if you could teach an old leftard a new trick. Survival of the fittest. Sadly they believe their own bullshit. I say if they can’t stand for what our forefathers stood for , then they should sit down ,and shut the hell up. Protect our 2nd amendment right to keep and 🐻 arms !!!
You don’t have to be a liberal to never have gone hunting. I am over 60 and I’ve never been. Born and raised in Chicago, I don’t know the first thing about it. I am sure my father ate plenty of venison back in the desperate days of the Depression in backwoods Pennsylvania, but he never spoke of it, and never hunted as an adult. He owned no guns. The only hunter in my family is my brother, who enjoys hunting birds. I suspect his Air Force buddies got him started.
The best stories always seem to take place in a ‘Midwestern college town’.
“The garden has to be protected from deer and rabbits.”
Sorry, not buying this one. Rabbits and deer show up in the middle of the night to destroy your garden. If you don’t have a very high dense fence, your garden WILL be devoured. I highly doubt that anyone in the family is keeping nightly watches of the garden.
This is just story embellishment.
I’ve seen deer in the garden in broad daylight. Guess they didn’t get the memo.
Florida issues deprivation permits. They are most often used at night. Deer harvested required to be processed by state statue.
“Deprivation permits.” Now that’s funny! (They are depredation permits, but the outcome is the same.)
Electric fence does most of the work. But it is not uncommon to see rabbits or deer in the evening or early a.m.
Another friend in the area keeps tabs on the critters he kills that are after his vegetables. He confided in me that he was up to 57 for the last three years…
I highly doubt that anyone in the family is keeping nightly watches of the garden.
This is why God made Shelties.
I walk my dog all the time passed the gardens at 10-11P, 1-2AM, for his evening shit. I keep watch?
Rabbits are one of the few animals that wiggle through welded wire fences. They cause obscene damage to tomatoes and breed like no ones business. Every other day I’m seeing several rabbits.
Life feeds on life. This remains true even for the tofu munchers and vegans. For you be alive and remain that way something else needs to die. Depending on what you are and how long you’d like to remain alive a lot of something else will need to die.
This is why I don’t buy it when some hyper emotional nutcase cries over something so far removed from his day to day life as to essentially be fiction such as the babies ripped from mothers meme or the one off homicidal maniac shooting up a school. If you really knew, if you really cared as much as you want me to believe you do you would cease to function among society and be reduced to a perpetually sobbing blob or off yourself to save the world of suffering your life and the death it brings.
Ok then, I think you’ve crossed the line from cynicism into sociopathy
‘They hunt.’
So do I. I’ll bet those soccer moms were taking their spawn home to a chicken, beef, pork or fish dinner. Some people need to be slapped until they ain’t stupid no more. Stupid should hurt.
The food that the gods want you to eat should be pre-packaged, laying on the ground, and ready to eat. Libtards actually say this crap!
I can certainly relate to this. Growing up on a farm, we learned these life lessons early on. The cycle of life sustaining life was impressed upon us all through everyday chores. Our families all grew up with a rifle or shotgun in our paws as soon as we could legally hunt. Prior to that we would be allowed to come along, provided we weren’t holding up the hunt.
My daughters saw meat harvesting hands-on also. But the family farms are dying a sad, painful death where I live, and with that the camaraderie that each autumn held for our hunting groups. Fewer of the younger generations hunt, that’s for sure. Shooting sports has changed drastically since my youth. I’m saddened by this, as the opportunities remain to hunt but they’d prefer to sit and blast water filled jugs with their guns instead. I don’t know the answer but I would love to hear your input on this.
Anyone who cries about hunting, simply ask them, “well are you a vegetarian?” 9/10 the reply will be “well, no..”
And even vegetarians and vegans eat farmed food.
I so often hear these people cry about the horrible way animals are raised in ways that aren’t natural (pigs and fowl raised in cages, cows raised in fenced-in places, etc). Yet the veggies they eat are all farmed.
Don’t they care about what they eat?
Watch out. That 1/10 pro-hunting vegetarian might confuse you. I’ve got 25 years in of not eating meat, because I don’t want to. I’m 100% pro-hunting and pro-cull for conservation, herd health, etc. I have frustrated many many of the 9/10 vegetarians by shooting down all their arguments. I even took down a grad school ethics professor once when he got smug about his dietary choices. I had more than a few shocked faces in the crowd when this university professor stammered through bad excuses and “i have to think about this more” and “i didn’t know that” – to which I replied “of course you didn’t know any of this or else you wouldn’t be making these terrible arguments”.
A couple of friends asked if I was going to tell him I was vegetarian too and that I was messing with him. I said “I wasn’t messing with him, I was serious. And my dietary choices don’t make any difference in how wrong he is.”
The John M. Browning designed Winchester Model 97 “hammer” pump action shotgun
(1897-1957) remains an iconic relic of the bygone generations Dean Weingarten alludes
to. This is one of the early repeating shotguns that gradually displaced in popularity
the classic American double-barrel shotguns from 19th/early 20th century America:
the Parker Bros. L.C. Smith, Ithaca, LeFever, Remington etc. Homeland Security was
once defined as a shotgun kept inside the farmhouse, homestead, shanty, trapper’s
shack or cabin, etc. Of course, there were the cheaper Belgian and European imports.
The British shotguns were generally more expensive. But Dean has a valid point here
and rightly asserts: “The older generations had a far better understanding of basic
realities than the current ones do.”
James A. “Jim” Farmer
Merrill, Oregon (Klamath County)
You have to admit that he phrased that just about as poorly as humanly possible. A family friend’s daughter, when asked what her mommy’s job was, told her teacher that mommy dresses up at night and picks up men. The mother is a police officer who works overnight shifts. When someone asks what your kids do for recreation, responding that, “they kill stuff”, makes it sound like they’re future serial killers, not sportsmen.
But then it wouldn’t have been funny. Doh! I think it is called “firing for effect.”
“The older generations had a far better understanding of basic realities than current ones do.”
That just might be one of the most accurate statements ever uttered in the last ten years or so. People today expect things to just be handed to them and assume that it was always like this. One day in the not to distant future they are going to be in for a very rude awakening.
Nothing wrong with playing sports too. In my case, sports probably occupied enough of my time that I otherwise might have spent making some bad decisions. And, as sports were played in my day, I also learned to lose and deal with failure.
You never lost! Everybody is a winner as long as they did their best! here’s a trophy for participation!
I think people over think and judge people’s lives way to much. If everybody mind their own business the world would be a better place.
As far as hunting I’ve done it all my life
Especially through the recession of 87
It put meat on my family’s table.
As a matter of fact my son and both my daughters hunt as well.
My family will not go hungry.
I can promise you that.
May everyone be blessed like I am .
May everyone be blessed with some type of firearm or many of them.
Long live the second amendment.
To true.
“…had stopped just short of an M.A. in music to be a professional meat cutter.”
Haha – I worked at a grocery store back in college and the head of the meat department was formerly a member of a professional symphony orchestra. Same thing – he quite for more money and a simpler life.
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