Word: deere
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...Shepards do not discuss it much, but they have taken sides in a simmering national argument. The question before the house, as the deer season bangs on in the rural background this Thanksgiving week, concerns the morality and future of hunting--and specifically whether children, who are its future, should be taught to hunt. Does it help them connect with their elders and the outdoors; to respect the power of weapons and the realities of life and death, as hunters believe? Or does killing animals, as hunting's opponents claim, damage young psyches, making children indifferent to suffering and ready...
...time hunting seemed heroic: a test of manliness, a mythic pageant, a recreational surrogate for war. Ernest Hemingway was savagely, sometimes childishly competitive for trophy animals. The '60s brought a shift, and Vietnam a sort of anti-Hemingway revulsion. Michael Cimino's 1978 movie The Deer Hunter ended with the hero lowering his rifle, declining to kill a good-looking buck that, before Vietnam, he would happily have slaughtered...
...maybe a class-based aesthetic revulsion against hunting preceded Vietnam. Just after the election in 1960, Lyndon Johnson brought John Kennedy down to the L.B.J. ranch in Texas and, much to Kennedy's distaste, forced him to go out shooting deer. Urbanity recoiled at bloody, redneck crudeness. That's how the moment was interpreted at the time. Hunters belonged to the oaf class, Elmer Fudds who were dumb enough to be flimflammed by Bugs and Daffy: "Duck season! Wabbit season...
...buys its meat in cling-wrap packages at Safeway and Winn-Dixie. "We've lost our connection to the land and the outside world," says Jerry DeBin, Alabama's coordinator of conservation education. "Most people don't even notice which way the wind is blowing today. The squirrel or deer may be eating more today because a change in the weather is coming, but we don't pay attention to these things anymore...
...someone love animals--cats, dogs, beasts of the field--and then shoot to death an animal as elegant as a deer or a dove? To answer the question, begin with the paradox of Teddy Roosevelt: America's greatest conservationist, creator of the national park system--and archtype Bambi killer. Roosevelt blazed away at all the animals of creation...