"The Evening Campfire" from
The Herald, Nov. 5, 2006
Not a harvest and not a sport
I opened a back issue of the
Pennsylvania Game News the other day and was immediately
confronted with an article on Deer Harvest Numbers. I
wondered — how did this word “harvest” come into
practice as a reference to hunting and fishing?
Isn’t it disrespectful to wild animals to imply that we
sow and reap them as predictably as farmers sow and reap
crops? Game animals are not bales of wheat or bushels of
beans that we plant and harvest as mindless fruits and
vegetables. They are living beings in a parallel
universe to our own, and their superior senses and
instincts make them worthy adversaries to those of us
who actively participate in the food chain.
Perhaps the term harvest arrived with our put-and-take
approach to pen-raised pheasants and hatchery-reared
stocked trout. But those bird and fish species could
survive in the wild as successfully as ruffed grouse,
wild turkeys, black bears, and white-tailed deer given
the right habitat and ecology. It wasn’t that many years
ago that wild ringnecks roamed Pennsylvania, and wild
trout thrive in the state to this day.
I think, instead, that certain terms have gained
prominence as euphemisms in a politically-correct
society that shuns frank discussion of killing and
eating animals. We’re afraid to say “I shot a deer” or
“I killed and ate a walleye,” so we use softer words
like “harvest.”
I’m not alone in this attitude, by the way. One of our
late great American outdoor writers, Edward Abbey,
disdained the use of the term “harvest” and wrote of its
distastefulness more than 20 years ago. Following is an
excerpt from an essay of Abbey’s that appeared in the
outdoors anthology A Hunter’s Heart:
“Where did the ugly term ‘harvesting’ come from? To
speak of harvesting other living creatures, whether deer
or elk or birds or cottontail rabbits, as if they were
no more than a crop, exposes the meanest, cruelest, most
narrow and homocentric of possible human attitudes
toward the life that surrounds us. The word reveals the
pervasive influence of utilitarian economics in the
modern mind-set; and of all the sciences, economics is
the most crude and obtuse as well as dismal. Such
doctrine insults and violates both humanity and life,
and humanity will be, already is, the victim of it.”
I also don’t like to apply the term “sport” to hunting
and fishing, and I don’t believe in outdoors
competition. I know this column appears in the sports
pages and my editor is the sports editor, and I
recognize the fact that outdoors people call themselves
sportsmen and sportswomen and their organizations
sportsmen’s clubs, but I don’t buy in.
The outdoors is an entire full and rich way of life to
me — far more important than the comparatively trivial
competitive pastimes of football and golf — and it’s a
means of getting away from the pressures of competition
in the workplace and the material world. That’s why I
don’t support big buck contests or bass tournaments or
the Boone and Crockett scoring of “trophy” antlers. I
don’t mind catching large trout and shooting big deer as
a rewarding but tiny aspect of the overall outdoor
experience, but I never want to make a sport of it. I do
own one mounted deer head, but I consider it a memento,
not a trophy.
A friend of mine, Jim Walker from Cincinnati, owns a
speedboat that’s about 18 feet long and one foot tall
with an outboard motor the size of a small truck. He
uses it to race back and forth across lakes and rivers
while vigorously competing in bass tournaments. Last
summer I took him fishing for wild trout up in Warren
County, where we strolled under the peaceful hemlocks
and cast fly lines for brookies in the soothing riffles
and quiet pools.
“Isn’t this better,” I asked Jim, “than tearing around a
lake in a monster motorboat trying to catch one more big
fish than the other guy?”
He looked at me and smiled. “I like to do both,” he
said.
I shrugged. To each his own, I guess.
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