Blue Rabbit Urine and kids with guns

[urbpan]

I got an email today from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. I had to google the acronym to figure out who they were, and their terse message indicated they wanted one of my photos. No offer to pay, just a request for permission and a for a higher-resolution image. They were asking about my blue rabbit urine photo. I'm not going to explain, you have to click that link and read it.

While googling NYSDEC I discovered an album full of photos of child hunters. By which I mean human children who hunt, as a hobby, not people or monsters that hunt children. There's something haunting about a picture of an eleven year old boy hoisting up a 42 pound coyote he's killed. Actually, probably an adult guardian killed the coyote, since I'm inferring that the age for firearms use in NY State is 14 (based on the deer hunter photos). (If I understand trapping correctly, the trapper sets a line of traps in the afternoon/evening, then checks them the next morning; animals are held in place but not killed by the traps, and the trapper shoots the trapped animal.)

And speaking of legally owning firearms, I got my FID card today. It's amusing to me that I got my driver's license just as I turned 30 and now I've gotten my first gun license as I've turned 40. For now, the card simply allows me to transport firearms as needed for work. I can see learning to use a shotgun and/or a rifle at some point (some point after we've moved from Massachusetts), as I think these are useful skills and useful tools. For the record, I am in favor of hunting for food, but I think it's absurd when people call it a "sport." Not that it doesn't take considerable skill, but it seems disrespectful to the animal to put it in those terms. Killing the animal by wrestling it to death, that would be a sport.

If I can find a higher-res image of my blue rabbit urine photo, they are welcome to publish it.

Comments

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Okay. Good to know. BTW, things look more blunt in typing without tone of voice. I'm not miffed or angry, and not feeling hostile if that's how it came off. Actually asking. Maybe I need to use more smiling emoticons. :-)

I don't demonize our basic survival instincts. (And I can't know for sure what I'd do if I had to use them: just knowing me I'm betting I'd be among the first to not survive. Which would be fine with me, I don't want to live in that world.) I also don't glorify them, or use them as an excuse to "go native" and kill things because "waall, it was good enough for muh daddy, and muh daddy's daddy: it's Family Truhdisuhn."* But being a NYC born-and-bred city girl, I know that -- absent The Apocalypse and The Sky Falling -- the rules of the concrete jungle are different. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to know how to survive if one has to. Then again, how often does one "have" to? Unless one likes to go camping on snowbound mountaintops, or have oneself dropped with only a pocketknife and a paperclip into the middle of a Canadian wilderness. :-)

*(yeh, I admit to having my fair share of East Coast Urban snobbery. Or standards, depending on who's doing the judging. :-) Slavery used to be a tradition. Genital mutilation is a tradition. Stoning wives that are raped is a tradition. I'm sick of the excuse of "that's how we've always done it, so it's still a viable response to our environment." (Or the other Biblical excuse of "God gave Man 'dominion': as an agnostic slouching towards atheism, that leaves me unconvinced.) I heartily disagree with the tradition rationale. Clearly. :-) And no, not saying YOU are using that excuse. It's just the one I usually get when this kind of conversation comes up.)

[propaddict.livejournal.com]

Aside from it be Maine wilderness and not Canadian: you got me pegged. :)

And I agree re: tradition. It's no excuse. I view it as a baseline, like, "If nothing else, we know this works." I despise the view that tradition is an inexorable "we've always done it this way so that must be how to do it."

[roaming.livejournal.com]

heh. At least we know what our geographical personality types are: we don't need to consult the Meyers-Briggs handbook! ;-P

I try (and sometimes fail) to not be extreme. I'm not a vegan. I don't throw red paint on people who wear fur nor break into labs to free all the bunnies. (Though I admit to admiring the people with the guts to the latter, while being embarrassed by the former.) I think it's "okay" to raise and kill animals for food -- just not to torture them while we're doing it.

I hope that the little boy in that picture was being taught respect and compassion for the coyote along with killing skills. I want him be very proficient at making a clean and fast kill if he's going to do so. What I hear about more is exterminating them as "pests" and "vermin": words that carry the message of arrogant disrespect for living things. That's my "religion": that all life has something in common -- call it a "soul" for lack of any better description -- that makes us connected in a way that we probably can't put words to, but that doesn't matter, it's real. (okay, okay, yeh, I've just seen Avatar twice and loved it. Guilty! :-) ) I think Life owes other Life something. And vive la difference!