Take-em!
“OK Dad, I’ll come for the long weekend, but I’m not sure I want to hunt with you,” Joey said as he wound up his longest conversation with his father in years. “Those couple of hunts you took me on when I was thirteen didn’t make a hunter out of me. I just remember being cold and that we didn’t shoot much. Anyway, I don’t know that I’m the type to enjoy killing things.”
Joey’s parents had divorced six years ago and his mother had moved them to a busy metropolitan area on the east coast. During those years, he’d seen very little of his father whose work as a petroleum engineer required extensive periods of foreign travel and residency. Joey’s experiences of nature and wildlife were limited to the local parks of Chevy Chase, Maryland, where hunting was neither encouraged or tolerated, camo clothing was regarded as a symbol of ignorance, and most people didn’t know a mallard from a mockingbird. Through deep immersion in urban life, he’d acquired the belief that hunting for sure and maybe fishing too were at best questionable activities not suited to the modern age of growing population, environmental problems of all sorts, and scarce resources. But he respected his father as a well-educated man, known as a staunch environmentalist of his community, who had hunted from boyhood on. What was the appeal of it? Why was he
