A little Friday surliness...

There are very few things - in terms of material possessions - for which I have an abiding weakness: nice shotguns, high-end fishing tackle, books, gun dog puppies, that sort of thing. I've just never been much of a gearhead or trinketeer. I like simple, quality, aesthetically pleasing stuff that works, even if I can rarely afford it.

I guess that's why I've never been much interested in attending any of the hunting and/or fishing trade shows. SHOT is, of course, going on right now and I did pitch the idea to my editor of attending the show and blogging about it. He wisely declined. Well, he said he loved the idea but budget constraints, you know. In truth, I'm sure he realized having me attend the SHOT show would be like sending Abbie Hoffman to cover thr annual meeting of Corporate Capitalists For A Deregulated Future (I just made that group up, BTW, so don't bother Googling it...).

So once again I'm sitting here at home, monitoring the non-stop SHOT show coverage on all the major hook-and-bullet websites, and once again I can't help but feel that SHIT show is a perfectly appropriate nom de guerre for this circus of the stupid, the unnecessary and the inane.

Trade shows overwhelmingly highlight products no one knew they needed, offer nifty solutions to problems no one knew they had and urge us to spend money we probably don't have on shit we definitely don't need (OK, so I paraphrased that last line from a passage in Fight Club...)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not completely anti-trade show, I'm not anti-progress and I'm not anti-new product. But here's the problem I have with many of these products: they add layers of ever-increasing complexity and technological dependence to an activity in which we should be stripping those layers away as fast as as we can.

There's been much discussion recently (and good discussion, I might add) about the ethics of hunting. Many very intelligent, thoughtful people take the position that anything that helps the ultimate goal of killing an animal quickly is ethical because hunting, parsed to its element, is about killing something. Baiting, crossbows during bow season, etc. Because these things help us kill animals quickly and more efficiently they are, by definition, ethical.

Now I'll save the issue of baiting for a future blog post, but I don't necessarily agree with the argument because I think the premise on which that argument is based is flawed, and in my rambling, seni-coherent way I'll try to explain why.

The way I see it there is a fundamental philosophical and practical difference between modern hunting and traditional subsistence hunting and the two simply can't be reconciled without recognizing those differences. What are they? Well, they're legion, but I think it all boils down to means and motivation.

It is true that the ultimate goal of traditional subsistence hunters was, of course, to kill something, and to kill it as quickly as possible so those who make the "any means possible is ethical" argument do have a point. To a point.

However, those traditional subsistence hunters had absolutely none of the modern conveniences that we are afforded. They relied on their woodsmanship and their wits. It was, by necessity, a raw, primitive, thoroughly atavistic experience. Now would they have traded that experience for the almost-sure thing that modern hunting tries to be? Probably, but that's not the point, is it?

To me, replicating that raw, primitive, thoroughly atavistic experience is the point,  the ultimate goal of modern hunting. It's not just the killing something that puts us in touch with whatever it is that compels us to hunt. If that were the case I'd go get a job in a slaughterhouse. But of course whether you agree with me depends on where your beliefs happen to fall on means versus motivation. The experience is the motivation for me, and how I kill something is just as important to me as the actual act of killing it.

And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with where modern American hunting is heading. It seems no one really cares how they kill things anymore, just so long as they do. And it seems that every new product that gets rolled out these days reflects that mentality.

(This is a severely truncated version of my thoughts on the subject, but for the sake of brevity I'll save the rest for later)

Now I recognize this could be debated endlessly and that my personal reasons for hunting open me up to a slippery slope of counterpoint, the old "if it's the experience you're after why not use a spear" argument. Fair enough. That's what debate's for, and let me make it clear that I'm not saying my way is how it should be. I'm just lamenting here, I'm not suggesting that lament be codified into law.

And I will be the first to admit there is a tinge of personal snobbery coloring my argument here. So much of modern American hunting "culture" as it were, is simply a reflection of how tacky, cheesy, cheap, superficial, torpid and willfully ignorant our larger culture has become.

But I guess that's fodder for a future blog post. Back to SHOT and our gear and convenience-obsessed hunting industry. Perhaps I wouldn't be so down on it if it featured less of the tits, the tramps, the tasteless, the tactical, the technological and a little more of the timeless, the tested, the trusted and the truly useful.

But then again, it wouldn't be there if there wasn't a market for it. Someone out there's gotta be buying this shit, right? Maybe I'm just being - in the recent words of a magazine-based editorial critic - a "douchebag."

Ehh... probably.


***At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, the guys over at F&S just posted a new SHOT show update, and damn it, some of it is pretty nifty. I'm nothing if not inconsistent..." ***