Maybe my idle mind is a little too, uh, idle this lovely Sunday afternoon.
With that, I’ll get something off my chest. It’s piddly and not too terribly significant, but it has to do — I think — with what I perceive to be a tilt toward political correctness.
Looking through my local newspaper — the Amarillo Globe-News — today, I noticed two captions under pictures on the Outdoor page of the Sports section. The pictures showed two hunters who had shot wild game. One was a water buck in South Africa; the other was a feral hog. The text under the pictures said the hunters “harvested” the animals.
This is not a new use of a common term. When I think of something being “harvested,” though, I think of cotton being stripped, of wheat being cut, of kids picking raspberries off the thorny bushes (which is what I used to do in the summer growing up in the Pacific Northwest).
Perhaps I should ask a newspaper copy editor, but short of that, I’ll pose the question here: When did the terms “shot” and “killed” become unacceptable for use in a daily newspaper in describing the act of hunting wild animals?
The animals shown today, as are the critters displayed all the time on that particular page, are pretty darn dead. Does the text below the pictures need to somehow soften for readers what they already can see with their own eyes?
Some folks — particularly those on the right — just love to criticize those who tend to use politically correct terminology rather than dealing straight up with whatever they’re trying to describe.
Is that what’s happening to our region’s hunting community, for crying out loud? Please tell me it ain’t so.
I think it depends on what you are actually doing and it will work itself out.
At our ranch we hunt every year and “kill” the deer specifically for the thrill of the hunt and for the meat
On the other hand every year we have to harvest a certain number of does governed by the parks and wildlife department to keep the population in check.
But I am with you if you intentionally cause their expiration you killed them. No big deal I kill them too.
Well I guess it depends on why an animal was shot and killed. I knew a family when I was growing up with seven children. The father had a job working for a farmer and he didn’t make much money. In order to feed his large family, he harvested cotton tails. He had a system for harvesting them. He had several cattle guards that he had rigged with a taut wire stretched across one end. On the way to work in the morning, he would surreptitiously approach from the other end, startling the sleeping rabbits. The rabbits would panic and run the opposite direction, hitting the wire, and more often than not, it would result in their deaths. He would then take them to work, skin and clean them, put them in a refrigerator, and bring them home for supper. I would call that harvesting. His oldest son and I would go out after school and supplement the harvest with our 22 rifles. There was no such thing as political correctness back in those days. It wouldn’t have mattered. The cotton tails were being harvested. These rabbits were slaughtered. They were killed and cleaned, same as what happens to cattle in a slaughterhouse. My point, besides sharing a memory of mine, is that harvesting of anything, plant or animal, results in food. Describing the killing of anything for any reason other than food purposes as harvesting is not something I would do.
The pics to which I refer suggest the critters were killed for sport. Thus, the term “harvested” seems oddly out of place.
You got that right. “Harvested” is not only out of place, but it doesn’t describe the circumstances.
I’m impressed, I must say. Seldom do I come across a blog that’s equally educative and engaging, and without
a doubt, you have hit the nail on the head. The problem
is something too few folks are speaking intelligently about.
I’m very happy I stumbled across this in my hunt for something concerning
this.
Why, thank you very much.