Hunting deer with dogs is a brutal sport involving dogs that chase deer to the point of exhaustion and then attack them by the throat. Sometimes, a panicked deer will plunge into a river or stream, hoping to escape its canine pursuers, but the dogs go in after it and occasionally drown a deer before the hunter arrives on the scene.
In a video I watched, I saw a large deer with impressive antlers standing in water up to its neck in an ice-cold slough, wholly exhausted. A relentless tracking dog harassed it, lunging at its throat. The buck was too tired to defend itself.
A hunter, stripped to his boxer shorts and an international orange sweatshirt, waded into the frigid water and shot the deer with his rifle from a distance of about five feet. The deer made a last desperate lunge at the hunter, who shot it a second time. Then he dragged the deer out of the slough onto dry land.
I found myself wondering about this dauntless hunter’s politics. I asked myself what he might think about tampon dispensers in the boys’ bathrooms at his son’s school. Perhaps the man has a high-school-age daughter. Would he be okay if a six-foot kid with a penis and hairy testicles competed against his daughter on the varsity girls basketball team?
Somehow, I doubt it.
Where will Americans go if we are plunged into nuclear war? Will we feel safe if we shelter in the Hamptons, where we can play tennis with the swells as we breathe radioactive air? Or will we be better off living down a rural Southern road from a deer hunter who will go to almost any length to bring meat home to his family and might deign to teach an urbanite how to hunt deer?
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| Deer hunting with dogs: Better than ice fishing with Tim Walz |
