Monday, September 22, 2008
Damien Enright takes aim at Palin’s moose-killing boasts
A MEDIA cliché proposes that because Sarah Palin, the US Republican vice-presidential candidate, hunts and kills wild animals — in this case moose — she must be thick. It does not follow.
For millennia, hunters were the smartest of the tribe. They embodied patience, knowledge of natural history, intelligence and skill. As I understand it, none of these attributes is required in killing moose, today. With high-powered rifles, telescopic sights and moose-callers, it simply requires a jaunt to the country, a point-blank target, and a pick-up truck to bring the carcass home.
Palin, in taking on the mantle of hunter, is playing to the ignorant. Moose is easy meat, and real hunters see through her posturing. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the iconic American philosopher, author and naturalist, wrote that killing these big, short-sighted animals was "like going out at night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbour’s horses". So much for Palin’s hunting heroics.
Palin seems to believe an important character reference for the job of second-in-command of a world power is the ability to kill and skin non-threatening animals. Shooting fish in a barrel isn’t nearly as easy as shooting moose in Alaska, where Palin is governor. Hundreds wander into the Anchorage suburbs every winter. Thoreau compared them to "great frightened rabbits".
Alaskan moose are the world’s largest deer. Adults stand seven feet tall and make a big target; they are either solitary males or females with calves. They are not the prettiest of God’s creations, having a doleful expression, a long nose like that of a horse, large dewlaps and a ‘smig’ under the chin. The male can look magnificent with his massive antlers, up to six feet broad and with as many as 30 spikes. Weighing three-quarters of a ton, males usually ignore humans who don’t bother them, but females are not to be messed with when they have calves.
The calves weigh 30 pounds at birth and quickly grow to twice the weight of a man. A high percentage get eaten by grizzly bears. If you comes upon a moose carcass when out walking, scarper fast; it is likely a grizzly has killed it for dinner and, if you hang around, you may become dessert.
Moose are browsers, stripping leaves and bark from trees but getting most of their food from aquatic plants. They are strong swimmers and sometimes feed in water up to their neck. Their eyesight is poor, but their hearing and smell are excellent. They are superbly adapted to their environment. While it may look ungainly, the moose is a wonderful creation.
For all the animal’s remarkable ability to survive in one of the earth’s harshest climates, John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate glories in shooting and skinning it. True hunters abjure such easy prey. Professional buffalo hunters weren’t true hunters; they were butchers and Palin sounds uncomfortably like them. She boasts about killing an easy target and ‘dressing’ a plugged moose as it lies newly dead in the snow.
Thoreau, after witnessing such a ‘dressing’, said: "…a tragical business it was — to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it." We must hope that Americans will reject anyone who revels in such butchery.
Palin’s moose-hunting claims are not about killing from necessity, but for kudos. They are not about stalking, patience and endurance. Her delusion that killing-power is a recommendation for leadership should concern the American electorate.
Posing as a fearless moose-killer may be a gung-ho strategy designed to appeal to the unthinking, but God forbid if she one day became president and continued to play to that audience. With all that added firepower, who knows on what or whom she might turn her gung-ho guns.
We live in a dangerous world and Sarah Palin is clearly an unimaginative, uniformed woman who relishes the spilling of blood. A moose is a decent creature; it leads a blameless life and kills nothing. In a choice between a moose and Palin, I’d definitely vote for the moose.
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