Such strange things you encounter while surfing.
So, there’s blogger who has dubbed Kerry “Senator von Munchausen” due to Kerry’s Christmas-in-Cambodia story and now he his trying to fact check a story Kerry told Field and Stream about hunting deer on Cape Cod. Kerry claims to have come-this-close to bagging a 16-point buck out on the cape. The blogger is dubious so he’s turning the distributed intelligence of the internet lose on Kerry’s hunting story.
That’s not the strange part.
Another blogger mentioned in same post is trying to confirm if Kerry ever ran in the Boston Marathon.
That’s not the strange part either.
The strange part is in a table of deer hunted in the state of Massachusetts that the first blogger links to. It really has nothing to do with Kerry other than to prove that people do actually hunt deer on the cape. The strange thing is the headings for the table. The columns are headed: shotguns, muzzleloaders, archery, unknown and …
…Paraplegic.
That’s the strange part.
It’s a seperate class of hunting license. Or, more accurately, a seperate class of tag which gives you a different season.
Most people confuse hunting with the act of harvesting an animal in the wild. That’s why anti-hunting people are so emotional about it. They also get it completely wrong.
If just shooting an animal was the entire point then we’d have farm raised animals shot in the cage. This would save a great deal of time, as well as cost less money.
It’s true that there are various businesses that will raise an exotic animal and allow some rich “sportsman” shoot it just as soon as it’s dumped out of it’s cage, but every single hunter I’ve ever come across views this as an abomination.
Hunting is, instead, an entire experience. There’s the enjoyment of a day spent in the wild, of course, but there’s also the sense of measuring your abilities against the elements. How tough are you, what are you willing to endure, to fill your tag?
For most people there’s the tradition of it. Many hunters were exposed to the sport by older family members such as a father or grandfather. The experience of a hunt is intensely personal, emotionally unpredictable. You naturally and inevitably form a bond with those who are with you during such moments, and that bond is almost impossible to describe to those who haven’t experienced it.
There are various programs to help parapeligic hunters, most of which target people who were once fully mobil before some sort of accident. They’re taken to a carefully prepared blind, there to wait with a helper for the one shot of the season. While on the hunt they are allowed to remember those times before they were injured, and to commune with the memory of loved ones that are gone.
The shot, if it comes, is almost non-essential. But it wouldn’t be a hunt unless you try to fill your tag.
James