A hunting friend proudly showed me a photo of himself, posing in snow with a dead moose the size of William Howard Taft. Pick your fight
with the right mooseIt was one of those cliche photos hunters love. After they blast a moose, they like to snuggle up next to it, hold up its head by the antlers and smile in a manly way at the camera, as if to say, "Behold, this grand beast whose life I have just snuffed out!"
I'm not one of those anti-hunting types. Some guys kill animals with guns, other guys eat cheeseburgers. They are just slightly different pixels in life's large moral mural. If you don't believe in hunting animals, you shouldn't be eating prime rib. Or McNuggets. Either living things are precious or they're buffet choices. You can't have it both ways.
So I was not particularly disturbed as I looked at the dead moose photo. I wasn't really interested, but I wasn't disturbed.
Then my friend explained how he succeeded in bagging this fine specimen of masculine moosehood. He snuck up and shot it while it was sitting down, gazing out at its large harem of moosettes.
"Wait," I said. "You snuck up and shot it while it was just sitting there? You didn't even let it get to its knees or stand up or anything?"
No, he said, that's not how moose hunting is done. Sure, it's great to track a moose through the woods and shoot him when he pauses to nibble at a few branches. But apparently it's perfectly acceptable to find a bull moose calmly hanging out with his herd of wives and blast him.
"It's not like we killed one of the females," he said. "That's against the law."
I was shocked. Partially because gunning down a moose who's not even standing up seems extremely unsporting, not to say somewhat sinister in a Sammy "The Bull" Gravano-underworld-hit kind of a way. And it's about as challenging as shooting a sofa. More importantly, it also seems to completely violate the concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
In the animal kingdom, an alpha males proves his dominance over lesser males in order to have the privilege of mating with females in the group. This assures that the strongest, fittest animal passes on his DNA to perpetuate the species. It doesn't make sense to kill such an animal.
Look at it this way. Imagine Sean Connery as the alpha male in a community of gorillas. He's the silverback, the big banana, the stud muffin. There are other strong males around, like Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford and a couple of the Baldwin brothers. But Connery beat them all and gets to mate with all the females in the gorilla camp. That's the way it should be.
But then, some alien hunter comes and shoots Connery. So one of the lesser males takes over. Then that male is killed by hunters. Pretty soon, you have a village of gorillas led by Peewee Herman. This is not good for gorillas or nature in general.
So I told my friend, "You killed Sean Connery. Now, some male moose who's not worthy will get all the chicks. We will no longer have the best mooses that nature can make. Instead, we'll have a bunch of DNA backwater mooses."
"You're a nut," he said.
He didn't get it. I let it drop. But I still think that hunters should not be allowed to sneak up and whack the dominant animal in a herd. They should have to drag their butts up hill and down dale to find those other males, the losers who are wandering around forlornly in the bush and shoot them.
I'm not saying that any animal deserves to die. But if you're going to kill something just to mount the head on a wall and make a few pots of chili out of the rest, you don't need to knock off Sean Connery. Drew Carey will do. And you'll get a lot more chili.