Friday, December 09, 2011
EVERY few years I’m trundled out to defend fieldsports; to celebrate and defend the great love that, increasingly, dare not speak its name.
Each time I ask myself the same questions — is it morally permissible to kill an animal to eat it? Is the joy of the chase a perversion? Are the traditions and responsibilities involved just a veil to hide unspeakable cruelty?
It’s over 40 years since I first shot and fished and today I’m more secure than ever in answering those questions in a way that allows me indulge the sports I love.
This is not an emotional, unthinking conclusion but the result of long self-questioning, occasionally self-doubt, and, I hope, objective reasoning.
I may not be a very good person but I’m not a bad person either and if I thought it wrong to kill animals I would not do it. It is that simple.
I find the whole experience so uplifting spiritually, physically, intellectually, socially and emotionally that it resonates so deeply as to make most of life’s other experiences seem a tad dull. It’s not a whim, it’s not a past-time, rather it’s an essential, throbbing definition of who I am and who I will be as long as I live.
Of course this won’t wash in the hysterical chorus that passes for debate on the subject but it is as true for millions around the world as it is for me.
About four million turkeys are produced — that is the right, industrially-hued verb — here every year. Next week most will be garrotted, electrocuted, beheaded, disemboweled or — if your tender sensibilities prefer — made oven-ready for Christmas. Some deluded people imagine it murder as if Dustin was one of the family. Like it or not that is what turkeys and all farm animals are for so let’s not be too sanctimonious or hypocritical about hunting.
Anyone for more cranberry sauce?
© Examiner Publications (Cork) Limited, City Quarter, Lapps Quay, Cork. Registered in Ireland: 73385.
