Headline on a news release we got yesterday:
Gov. Nixon harvests deer in Pulaski County
With all due respect to our friends at the Missouri Department of Conservation (and in the Nixon communications office), do we have to refer to the hunters who go out and put a bullet in Bambi as “harvesting” deer?
When I was growing up on a small Illinois farm, our neighbors harvested crops–corn, beans, hay. My grandfather harvested wheat in Kansas. Big machines with big round things on the front –reels– would gobble up the crops, shred the grain out of the stalks, store it in a bin and spew the dusty chaff out the back. Bailers towed behind tractors would likewise devour the winrowed hay, compact it into 80-pound rectangular bales, and kick them out the back on a chute. Those of us working on the wagon would reach out with a large, vicious, steel hook and pull each bale onto the wagon where we would scientifically stack it so the cargo would not fall off the wagon on the way to the barn—five high and a tie, most often, as I remember it.
The mental images of “harvesting” deer that stick in the back of my mind when we get statistics from the department each year are too ghastly to describe here. And I don’t even want to think of the results with corn pickers.
Baled Bambi? Good Lord!
We hope the department doesn’t mind if we refer to the “deer kill” numbers after the end of the firearms season today.
A Deere harvester is a machine. A deer hunter is a killer.
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I agree. Its called deer hunting and you shoot and kill a deer.
While I see your point, there is a sound reason for the term harvesting deer. MDC works with private landowners, hunters and others to manage our state’s free-ranging deer population at sustainable, healthy levels. Hunting is the primary way we manage deer numbers. Killing implies simply ending a life, while harvesting better explains a managed approach to the end result of hunting and the ultimate use of the product as food.
Bob,
I guess you realize that many of your agricultural “harvesting” examples result in the deaths of the individual plants.
“A deer hunter is a killer.”
Oh good grief. Harvesting. Hunting. Whatever. Get over it.
The common mule deer is not ‘bambi.’ It is little more than an antlered rat that destroys cash crops and spreads disease, if not managed properly – like a crop, which is then harvested.
Good grief.