The Hunting Of Hell House

1/3/06


I want to talk about hunting, ladies and gentlemen. Wait, wait! Come back here! It’s not what you expect; the pinko liberal isn’t going to rail against hunting as an archaic, disgusting practice. Well…yeah, he is, actually.

I don’t devote a great deal of time to thinking about hunting or hunters for the same reason that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about twisting the heads off of infants; I find it unpleasant to do so. For this certain instance, I want to start with a little anecdote.

For several months, up until a few weeks ago I had been working between eight and twelve hours overtime at my office because I have a sincere desire to not live on the street; so you know right away I wasn’t in the best frame of mind. I mean, I’m spending an extra day to day and a half at a place that, at the best of times, is somewhere I’d only marginally rather be than inside a dog’s asshole. One Friday night around six I’m starting to look forward to going home in an hour or so, and it’s only me and the guy who sits across from me left in the office. He’s not a bad guy, I guess, but seeing as I can’t imagine what I’d do with another male friend I’ve said maybe seventeen words to the guy in the past six months.

Then it happens. That moment any introvert fears and despises; some jerk wants to make small talk with you about canning tuna or something equally as fascinating when all you want to do is just quietly listen to your audio book and try to ignore the clock for another hour. I can’t recall all that we talked about, (or that he talked about, I mostly said “yeah” without making eye contact,) but near the cusp of this terribly cerebral conversation he, out of the blue, made a psychotic about-face in the conversation and brought up disemboweling a rat.

I’m not kidding. There was this modest hum, (him talking?) coming from his direction and then all of a sudden it coalesced into this strange little man telling me about killing a rat in his house and attempting to skin and disembowel it preparatory to feeding it to his cat. I don’t know what kind of cat this guy has, but I’m imagining a sort of geriatric cougar too old and frail to catch and kill his own meat and this wacko is trying to give the old fella a taste of his glory years, like a shady night club owner renting some tail for the old crooner who was big once, but let’s face it, has his best days behind him. The worst part of this diatribe of horrors came when he told me, in stark detail, just how “…bad this thing stunk because it had shit all over itself and kind of smelled like the sewer…” And I’m just trapped there! What about my monosyllabic responses and one earphone hanging off makes this personal rodent eradicator think I care about his soliloquy of putrescence is beyond me. Mostly I’m thinking, “What the fuck planet am I on?! AGGHHHHHHHRRRHGHH!”

I might have accidentally strung three of four words together to express a milder version of this thought because he looked at me quizzically for a beat, much in the way a postman would peer at a wild-eyed dog whose gate is ajar and has the look of a Democrat about him, and he said,

“I take it you don’t go hunting.”

“Uh, no,” I said, “I don’t much enjoy killing things. I don’t even squish bugs if they’re not actively attempting to inject me with venom.”

The rest of our conversation is inconsequential, much like the first part of it save as a long-winded introduction to random encounters with hunters. Here’s my feeling on hunting: I don’t care how you package it, but if you like hunting you enjoy killing things. What other reason could there be for wearing ridiculous outfits in freezing weather? Usually the intended victims are rather cute, furry things; nobody hunts centipedes, for instance, and I’m just a little uncomfortable with anyone who likes to go out and walk, or more often sit, in the woods waiting to send hot, high-caliber ammunition ripping through the body of another living being that hadn’t even wronged his family in any way.

I can understand, (I actually can’t but it sounds more open-minded if I say I can,) the biological compunction to kill things. Not so long ago, anthropologically-speaking, hunting was necessary for many people to survive. This is no longer the case in America; sure people are starving, but you don’t see too many of the inner-city’s homeless out in the forest with high-powered rifles. So you’re not hunting for food; you’re hunting because punching a phone-book sized hole in a formerly breathing animal causes a release of dopamine in your brain like some kind of butcher reward.

I’ve also heard that old adage that “If we didn’t hunt certain animal populations would rage out of control!” As if I’m supposed to believe that your motivation for hunting is not that you like to dominate a lower species, but out of some heavy sense of obligation for thinning out the planet’s herds of things that look good stuffed and mounted on a wall. You’re right; if people didn’t hunt, deer populations, for instance, would run out of control…for two or three seasons maybe, then nature would correct itself and things would go back to the way they were for millions of years before homo sapiens jumped on the scene. Well, except for the continuing urban sprawl which will eventually cause such animals to die off due to habitat extinction.

I’m not advocating people stop hunting. Actually, it wouldn’t be a bad idea, but I’m not so much of an idiot as to believe that will occur. The same things that have made us so successful as a species: greed, selfishness, and brutality, also makes us generally rather horrible to each other and the rest of the planet as a whole. We have our good qualities, too; we’re capable of unbelievable compassion, love and heroism, but that’s not on the roster today. The trouble is that our biological imperatives which served us so well when living in caves and mostly trying not to die are outdated and unnecessary in modern society. Our technological evolution has far outstripped our social and biological evolution and it’s up in the air whether we’ll be able to balance it out before we fuck ourselves right in the ass. But I seem to have gotten a little off point here, so I’ll just finish by saying that all I want is for hunters to stop acting like it’s some great, bonding and spiritual experience and just admit that you enjoy the unnecessary practice of killing living things. I don’t even want you to stop; I’m just looking for some honesty. Tell you what, you admit that, and I’ll admit that I’m a liberal pinko queer who wishes to wussify our society to a point where we are all engaged in non-stop apologies. Deal?