Tag Archives: hunting

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Cecil becomes martyr to a worthy cause

cecil

Cecil the Lion might not have died in vain.

Consider this: Outrage over the beast’s killing has spurred renewed calls for severe restrictions, even outright bans, on trophy killings of big-game animals.

This gives me hope that we human beings can become a touch more civilized after all.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cecil-the-lion-shows-shifting-attitudes-toward-africas-big-game/ar-BBlkQOU

Cecil’s death at the hands of an American dentist has prompted calls for the dentist’s return to Zimbabwe, which wants to prosecute him for poaching. Cecil was a beloved big cat, a favorite of tourists visiting the preserve where Cecil lived with his pride of lionesses and the cubs he sired. Then he was lured out of the restricted zone into a place here Palmer allegedly shot him.

There’s been international anger over the incident.

I now will stipulate a couple of things.

First, I’m not a hunter. Yes, I’ve gone hunting. My most memorable excursion was in Washington state, in 1970. I had returned home from Vietnam and went with some Army pals into the Olympic Mountains to track down a black bear. We didn’t find anything, but we had a wonderful day traipsing through the forest.

I don’t know what I would have done with the beast had I shot one.

Second, I’ve never much liked the idea of hunting animals just to mount their head on a wall and brag about what a brave man I am. I understand that some individuals do like doing these things and in some way I also understand the thrill of tracking down big game and firing a kill shot.

It’s just not my thing, you know?

Plus, being a city slicker my entire life, I’ve never had the need to hunt animals for food. But those who live in rural settings and who cannot get to the grocery store regularly, well, I can understand how hunting fits into someone’s lifestyle.

However, I’ve long preferred to live on a planet populated by plenty of God’s other creatures.

Cecil was one of them. His death seems to energized the feeling among millions of other humans that the world is big enough to share.

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'Harvested' instead of 'killed'?

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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.