Where's The Sport? Poem by Donal Mahoney
Where's The Sport?
Antonin Scalia is dead, a famous U.S. Supreme Court judge who loved to hunt. He died in bed on a hunting trip, apparently of natural causes.
There were 35 hunters in his group. They flew to a farm in Texas designed to give folks with money a chance to spend it shooting wildlife.
I'm not interested in Judge Scalia's court decisions or who will replace him. I'm interested in what motivated him to hunt. He made enough money to buy his meat. So I have to assume he hunted for sport.
My question has always been, where's the sport?
Where's the sport in hunting down and killing an animal you might not eat but want to stuff and hang over your mantel.
I don't hunt or fish but I would if I didn't earn enough to feed a family. Any edible animal in season I would kill so we could eat. So killing an animal isn't the issue. It's why an animal is killed that I sometimes don't understand.
I see no sport in shooting quail or duck or deer or any animal that cannot kill me and simply wants to be left alone to eat and mate.
Nor do I see any sport in pulling a giant bass out of the water simply because it fights so hard to stay there and would make a great trophy.
As a kid I fished for bluegill and catfish and if we caught any, someone's mother fried them up and we ate every one.
We didn't fish for sport. We fished to eat the fish. Truth be told, I just went along with friends who came from families who fished but the lady who fried those fish knew what she was doing. Nothing quite like a plateful of fried catfish with hush puppies, slaw and fries.
But I still need someone to tell me where the sport lies in killing a wild animal that can't kill me and doesn't even want to see me. Don't tell me they're tough to corner and expect that to be an answer. I'd be tough to corner too if someone was coming at me with a gun.
If I wanted to kill for sport, I'd join the army and look forward to killing people who wanted to kill my fellow citizens and me. I'd have no problem shooting the enemy provided they wanted to bomb our country or spread chemical gas in our subways. They would be fair game in my eyes.
So would anyone coming through my bedroom window at midnight.
But I see no sport in shooting wild animals. Except, of course, for a mountain lion jumping off a cliff and about to land on me. Or a cottonmouth in the grass ready to strike just above my ankle. But that's not sport—that's survival.
If someone who hunts for sport reads this, please tell us your side. Maybe Judge Scalia addressed this issue at some point in his life, and I might use Google to try to find his explanation. But in the meantime, I thought others who hunt for sport and not for food might like to explain where the sport is.
So far, I can't find it.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/15/2024 11:33:02 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Well, Donal, I'll try and explain why I like to hunt. I lived in the Catskills for 40 years, where some of the high schools close on the opening day of deer season, because so few students show up- some of the teachers as well. We ate venison all year. I prefer it to any other meat. I loved being out in the woods and hills, sitting silently sometimes for four hours at a time, sometimes in a freezing rain, maybe memorizing a poem, or watching birds and animals do the most amazing things- that I would never have seen if I didn't hunt. I loved learning to shoot straight, to find my way through a forest, to outsmart deer- for often they outsmarted me. I even loved butchering the deer myself- learning to survive without supermarkets. I loved the friends who hunted with me all those years, most of them now gone or too lame to walk. I know deer would starve without being limited by hunters, as they did in huge numbers during last year's snows. I loved watching a good dog flushing pheasant and being able to hit those birds on the wing. To me, hunting is part of America's tradition. I think it is a good tradition. If you've never tasted my wife's pheasant stuffed with crab meat, you can't appreciate when hunting is. That is the story in as short a form as I can give it to you. With best wishes to you, Gene L.
Gene, You make very good sense and you hunt not only for the joy of hunting but for the good eating that your hunting provides. I have no problem with that. What I trouble understanding is those who hunt simply to kill an animal whose noggin they can stuff and put over their mantel, That for me is hard to understand. I am more curious about the motivation than I am about the act of killing and mounting. I competed in basketball and Irish dancing and I was very competitive as a young person. But honestly the trophies and medals meant more to my father than to me. I cared about winning. And if I were a hunter or fisherman I would care about eating what I killed. Not only Scalia's death while at a hunting ranch but also a photo of a bow hunter with his kill of a magnificent 12 point buck got me to thinking. I would have had to be very hungry to kill so magnificent an animal. And I am not soft-hearted. I would shoot a burglar in seconds. It's killing to mount over the mantel that I don't understand. Your explanation is a good one and should be written up for people who simply object to hunting altogether. I've never been in that camp. And I have had venison summer sausage in my time and it was delicious, needed no comments. Thanks for your response.