To the Editor:

Here’s what happened: As I walked my dog this morning a huge bleeding buck — 12 or 14 point — charged across the street into a neighbor’s yard, an arrow stuck in its left shoulder.
I live in a residential neighborhood where deer also live. I encounter them daily on walks. They regularly get hit by cars. Deer are not, in short, an unusual sight, and this is not the first wounded deer I’ve seen.

But that arrow. I called the police. Here’s the conversation:

Me: There’s an arrow-wounded buck in my neighborhood.

She: It’s hunting season.

Me: Is this a municipal cull?

She: No, this has nothing to do with us.

Me: So this is just some idiot with a bow and arrow?

She: No, it’s a hunter.

Me: Apparently a bad one if he left a wounded animal to suffer.

She: *silence*

So I called Animal Control. Mark Johnson came, then called to say he’d tracked the buck into the woods. He hoped to find it later today. When he does, I know he’ll shoot it. Under the circumstances, the right thing. I’m not against all hunting. If you hunt for food, are skilled and don’t leave wounded animals to drag themselves off to die, fine. But in most cases this means using a rifle, competently. It also means that should you wound an animal you have the responsibility of tracking that animal down until you find it. If one is going to eat meat, perhaps the least offensive manner of obtaining it is by being responsible for tracking, killing, skinning, butchering, and preparing it. In that way you are accountable, you are in relationship with the animal in a way you aren’t if, like me, all you do is go to Whole Foods and buy a steak (even a pasture-raised animal and not a factory beast).

That entire argument goes out the window, though, in the face of retro-macho bow hunting. Few are good at it. More animals suffer, and not because the hunter hunts in order to feed himself or his family, but so that the hunter can play out some archetypical masculine fantasy (regardless of gender). A hunter friend tells me the meat from a wounded animal is often inedible, because the wound festers and becomes gangrenous. Lovely.

What happened this morning is cruel and immoral.

Lauren B. Davis

Gallup Road