11/29/10 WHY I HUNT

THE MORNING AFTER
Monday, 7:45 AM. 34 degrees, wind SW, very light. The sky is overcast and the barometer predicts precipitation.
Everything goes back to normal this morning with a lot of stuff to do that has been on hold. The truck goes to the body shop for repairs, Lucky goes to the vet to diagnose his persistent cough and Joan stops at the clinic. I have tree board and Arbor Day chores that have to be done in the next several days. This year’s unsuccessful deer hunt will soon fade into memory, as the last several have done. It is human nature and probably a good thing to forget our failures and mostly remember our successes, but I still have some time for ruminating before memories fade; was my lack of success due to my deficiencies as a hunter, to the lack of deer or simply a lack of luck? Ego would deny the first factor, and approve the later two. I’m not sure where complete honesty would reside.
Anyway, I can justify my exertions by citing my love of the out-of-doors and respect for tradition. But the bottom line is there is no venison in the freezer.
However, there are other reasons I hunt, which have little to do with nature. I rebel at the politically correct view that the blood sports are anachronistic and somehow evil, and the more they are protested the more I will participate, and defend them.
But perhaps the most basic reason I hunt is political. I hunt to defend my second amendment right to keep and bear arms, for that is the most basic of all freedoms, and the first to be lost to tyranny. Much of the anti-hunting propaganda is simply a poorly veiled power grab by those who would have us all enslaved by an overweening, overpowering government, whether foreign or domestic. There are many well-meaning folks who are blind to that fact.
I still remember vividly what I was told a few months ago by a recent immigrant from Mongolia; the first thing the Communists did upon taking power in her homeland was to confiscate all the hunting rifles. A freedom undefended is a freedom soon lost.