Word: roosevelts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mania, the one surrounding teddy bears early this century. Their ascendance stemmed partly from adult interest, says Gary Cross, a historian and author of Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Yes, the bears were cuddly, but parents liked the story that inspired them: Theodore Roosevelt's saving a baby bear on a 1902 hunting trip. Nevertheless, it was kids who ultimately made teddy bears more than a fad. It took at least four years for teddy bears to sell well, only after kids across the country started seeing them...
...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...
Consider a scene in his magnificent 1893 book, The Wilderness Hunter: one minute Roosevelt watches, with a benign Wild Kingdom-documentary fascination, as two rutting bull elk clash in the Bitterroot Mountains, with a third bull, whom Roosevelt calls "the peacemaker," trying to intervene, and the next minute, having made the reader see and almost love the animals and wish them well in the exuberant politics of their courtships, Teddy lifts his rifle and blows away all the bulls, dropping them one, two, three...
...Roosevelt integrated the paradox of hunting--killing as part of a love of nature and of life. We, a century later, have separated it out and, being morally literal-minded, feel obliged to take a stand on one side of the paradox or the other...
...only be learned from hunting. Many plants and animals die daily to keep us fed, and hunting brings us into that process." Like many hunters, he teaches his son, 12, not to shoot anything he doesn't mean to eat. The hunting question always comes back to the Teddy Roosevelt paradox: Can we love animals and eat them? Can we love them and kill them...