Re: Thoreau on the Moose, Paul Theroux

[Mary Scriver <prairiem@3rivers.net>]

> for me the outrage comes less from the fact
> that animals are killed but more from the swagger of many hunters.

Of course, the ones who don't swagger are imperceptible, too.  Bob 
Scriver, to whom I was married, was so secretive about hunting that he 
had to be pressed to tell people where we were going for safety's sake. 
 ("We" was the two of us, plus two horses.)  We went for the day, took 
only a lunch and some peanut bars, and never came back without meat.  
He was very much a Paul Shepherd sort of hunter, seeing it as a sort of 
privileged ceremony, wanting it to be personal.  We hung and cut our 
own meat, ate it ourselves.

But his brother, who went with a group of men, many of them at least 
partly Blackfeet, went via pack train way deep into the Rockies to 
establishing hunting sites.  Much of the action (I'm secretly told) was 
sitting around a campfire with alcohol, celebrating the evasion of 
family and business.  Sometimes they had meat to pack out, sometimes 
not.  Rangers kept an eye on them.  They used commercial meat cutters.

"Hunting" is usually treated as a monolithic concept, which makes it 
vulnerable to stereotyping.

Factory farming and closed slaughterhouses are often evading the law or 
at least the humaniacs.  Around here they are most common on Hutterite 
colonies which are even more private.  It's the organic free-range pig 
farmers who say,  "Come on over!"

Prairie Mary