Theme, Week Ten

My sister Tara hates hunting. She reasons that it's brutal to go out and kill innocent animals regardless of an individuals purpose. I can certainly respect her intention; it shows that she at least has a consience. It's strange, however, because Tara grew up in a household where hunting was a mainstay. Every year, every season, my father, brothers, and even some sisters would hunt for deer, partridge, ducks, and rabbits. I suppose that seeing all of these dead animals, and witnessing them being cleaned must have had some impact on her current opinion of the matter. 

This last week I asked my sister to lunch when I was in Portland  for the day. We ordered our food, and Tara began to tell me about a hunter that she had fooled this last deer season. With her face flashing between humor and disgust (depending on the part she was talking about) she told me how she had seen a hunter creeping up a hill with his bow toward a group of deer. Expressing her disregard for the sport of hunting (as I'm sure she did that day in her car) she chuckled as she told me that she had honked her horn and scared all of the man's prey away. After informing Tara of my disgust with her actions, she proceeded to go into a rampage about how, "these poor deer have moms and dads, and just want to live! What gives us the right to go and kill them, just because some asshole has a superiority complex and feels more like a 'hairy caveman' when he murders some innocent creature." 

Just then our meals arrived, Tara grabbed her big juicy burger and took a bite. I couldn't help but think about the farm that I used to hunt on with my father. The farmer, Bussy York, used to come out and tell us about butchering his cows. I can still picture his wrinkled face as he would express how terribly he felt about the way that he ended so many of their lives. He would use a bolt gun and shoot the bulls at the base of their skulls while they were trapped in a metal frame. 

Tara's still outraged by the fact that hunters go out and find their "wild" prey and kill it. She's really passionate when it comes to the ethics of killing.