Diatribe

[Sarah Palin teaching her daughter kindness and compassion. The Governor's pro-life stance apparently has some exceptions.]

I remember -- in a former life -- meeting a sheriff's deputy who was bringing a kid from a group home back to Solano Juvenile Hall. The group home had a pet deer and the messed-up little bastard had kicked it in the stomach his first day there. Which was fairly shocking behavior. So they sent him back in favor of "a more structured environment", i.e. a locked down one.

It occurred to me at the time that the affable deputy could go out and shoot a similar deer that weekend -- point a rifle at it, aim, pull the trigger, watch the jolt as the bullet crushed the animal, watch it bleed to death, then skin and dismember it -- and he would continue to be an esteemed fellow county employee. No structured environment for him. I knew the deputy. He was a good-natured reasonable guy, a family man, and not at all stupid.

The difference between the two behaviors is that one is socially approved, so much so that we are anaesthetized to what it is. Without the social labels, it is just the wanton killing of inoffensive animals for no reason. It is an expression of the same destructive impulses as drive vandalism and arson. The comedian Chris Rock called it "killing animals on a full stomach". It is part of the culture and history of Alaska, much as slavery and lynching were a part of the history and culture of Alabama. That was a grand old tradition too.

I am not such a fool as not to realize that normalcy is socially constructed and that the deputy was not a psychopath. His behavior was normal because the society in which he lived had taught him the behavior and approved and accepted it as normal and unremarkable. Alabama slaveowners who beat their slaves were not psychopaths either, for the same reasons. My notion is that I want it to be seen as psychopathic, because without the institutional justification it would be. If either behavior is considered without the institutional interpretation and labels, then one is the pointless killing of inoffensive animals and the other is the beating of defenseless human beings.

The values and justifications for each behavior are widespread where the institution exists. It was no coincidence that abolitionist sentiment arose where the institution of slavery did not exist and had vanishingly few adherents in places where slavery did exist. Similarly, antipathy to hunting is primarily an urban attitude in our time, and is seldom heard where hunting is widespread.

I don't think antipathy to hunting is political correctness. I think of PC as the carrying a reasonable notion to absurd extremes, so much as to trivialize it. It is when one extends the idea that women should get equal pay for equal work and be free from sexual harrassment to the notion that they must also be exempt from hearing dirty jokes and that their gender should be spelled "womyn".

The right to own slaves was an expression of the institution of slavery. Similarly the right to hunt is an expression of the institution of hunting. If the institution were to become disfavored and eventually abolished, the right would be abolished with it. In any case it isn't a right. You have a right to kill your dog because it is your property, but not your neighbor's dog because it isn't.

Whose property is a wild caribou? Historically, wild animals belonged to the king. Hunting rights were given to nobles as part of their tenure as vassals. Which is why common people were not allowed to hunt without permission, which was rarely given. Poaching was severly punished. Today wild animals belong to the public generally and to the government specifically. All the more so because most wild animals are found on public lands. If you have ever had to pay to enter a national park, you already know that the government can and does set restrictions on entry and on use of public lands. Every state regulates and taxes hunting. Alaska too has elaborate and detailed hunting regulations. It follows that it is a revocable privilege.

It is not clear to me that anybody has a right to destroy an animal that doesn't belong to him. It is not the government that would be infringing rights by restricting it -- it is the hunter that is infringing on the public's property interests. Restricting and eventually abolishing hunting would simply be the end of the public's sufferance of a peculiar institution. Every argument in defense of it, and the fact that these wheezes are so invariably trotted out shows that even the goodest of good old boys feels defensive about what he is doing, is based on a fallacy or on an outright lie.

The classic one is that hunting is about getting free meat. Like these stupid bastards spend $55,000 on a Ford F-350, buy an expensive camper for it, buy an arsenal of rifles and shotguns, take time off work, buy gas to drive hundreds of miles, because they want to save money on groceries? I don't think so. And then they trot out the idea that it is a sport. In a sport either player or team might win. Does a caribou ever shoot a hunter? Which is it -- groceries or sport? They tell you both because they're lying about both. Or population control. The beast of the field and of the air got along for millions of years without any help from the hunters but now somehow they can't. The fact is that the hunters can't justify it even to themselves.

All of which is just arguing. The real reason is that I saw the stupid bastards chasing and killing caribou. One of them was limping in pain, doomed, if she was lucky, to bleed to death on the tundra. Or the agony might go on for weeks until the wound became so fly-infested that she died of infection. The caribou were bothering nobody, hurting nobody. Every sensation of order and decency and justice cries out, "Leave them the hell alone!" But the hunters just kept coming in their pickups and ATV's and airplanes and helicopters. They are not yet permitted to shoot from aircraft, but they use them to chase the herd toward the hunters. Some sport.

And who did the caribou have to defend them from these assholes? Why Governor Palin of course. Whose grinning picture and pandering letter in the hunting regulations booklet begins, "Dear Fellow Hunters..."