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41ada66
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The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
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humor
hunting
perspective
shooting
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P.G. Wodehouse |
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987600c
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If we act like prey, they'll act like predators
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fear
truth
hunting
prey
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Alyxandra Harvey |
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47a9e72
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Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.
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hunting
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Matthew Scully |
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04776bd
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This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting--to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.
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animal-welfare
animal-rights
veganism
vegetarianism
meat
hunting
animals
food
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Michael Pollan |
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886a9d2
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"We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerors. Possibly it feels good to these men to be superior to animals, but it does seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it. Often a man who is afraid must constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must keep a tangible record of his courage. For ourselves, we have had mounted in a small hardwood plaque one perfect [bighorn sheep] dropping. And where another man can say, "There was an animal, but because I am greater than he, he is dead and I am alive, and there is his head to prove it," we can say, "There was an animal, and for all we know there still is and here is proof of it. He was very healthy when we last heard of him."
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trophy
hunting
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John Steinbeck |
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4ec743c
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But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know how.
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humor
hunting
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John Steinbeck |
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df2cb14
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It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
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hunting
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Beryl Markham |
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565f463
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I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
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hunting
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Beryl Markham |
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1c06b04
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"This is what it means to be a fanatic - but a fanatic, that is to say, in a very special sense. It has little in common with the obsession of the politician or the artist, for instance, for both of these understand in a greater or lesser degree the impulse which drives them. But the sportsman fanatic - that is another matter entirely. His thoughts fixed solely on a vision of that mounted trophy against the wall, the eyes now dead that were once living, the tremulous nostrils stilled, the sensitive pricked ears closed to sound at the instant when the rifle shot echoed from the naked rocks, this man hunts his quarry through some instinct unknown even to himself. Stephen was a sportsman of this kind. It was not the skill needed that drove him, nor the delight and excitement of the stalk itself, but a desire, so I told myself, to destroy something beautiful and rare. Hence his obsession with chamois. ("The Chamois")"
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sportsman
trophy
hunting
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Daphne du Maurier |
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cb99e11
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I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called , and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.
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criticism
big-sur
correspondence
kerouac
hunting
beatnik
letters
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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cae92f2
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You may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and you can; But kill not for pleasure of killing, and SEVEN TIMES NEVER KILL MAN.
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hunting
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Rudyard Kipling |
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a9fc282
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None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion. He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment. The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.
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stupidity
hunting
lions
tourists
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Beryl Markham |
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293a6a1
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I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn't be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I'm a Hemingway man myself although I don't believe it is right to hunt lions.
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life
tennessee-williams
hunting
thinking
lives
introspection
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0bbafb1
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Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin.
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gambling
hunting
series
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Pete Hautman |
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93cb619
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"There are three ways to take down a wild tusklan. The average hunter takes a large-bore weapon with which to shoot the animal. When it works, the method is quick and efficient. But if the first shot fails to hit a vital organ, the tusklan may be upon its attackerbfore a second shot can be aimed and fired. The wise hunter takes a smaller-bore weapon. The method is less likely to produce a first-shot kill, but the second, third, or fourth shot may succeed. However if the bore is to small, none of the shots will penetrate to vital points, and the tusklan will again triumph over its attacker.
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thrawn
hunting
star-wars
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Timothy Zahn Star Wars: Thrawn |
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c00f055
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Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.
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like-life
lorrie-moore
orgasm
hunting
guns
boys
disappointment
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Lorrie Moore |
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4e7522f
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"By the 1920's, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan's upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in "Of Wolves and Men", his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner's way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained? There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf."
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north-america
hunting
wolf
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Nate Blakeslee |
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6734d89
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"Karen was cuddling her favourite stuffed animal, a mint-green toy deer which she called "Annabelle". Sometimes Jesse wondered about this... Karen loved the taste of venison and couldn't wait to shoot her first deer so she could brag to her friends about it. She had a pink camo baseball cap with "hunter" embroidered on the front. She enjoyed watching every year as Robert took out his big steel-bladed saw and sliced the antlers off his latest prize. So, why'd she cry every time she watched Disney's Bambi? Why'd she treat an inanimate toy as a living thing, but a living thing as an inanimate toy?" --
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bambi
inanimate-object
rite-of-passage
deer
hunter
stuffed-animal
hunting
childhood
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Rebecca McNutt |