CSotD: A cooler relationship with nature
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I've got to admit, he'd end up in my cooler, too.
Sherman's Lagoon includes a strong element of conservation and often manages to sneak a fair amount of education on the topic into the gags. But it also exhibits a healthy streak of realism.
It's been quite a few years since I have done any fishing, but I always saw it as recreating the primal struggle, not "man vs. nature" but "man in nature."
Which, contrary to our naive, TV-fishing-show-watching pal here, is not a conflict. It's a relationship.
And it is a relationship that makes it easy to understand the idea that, among at least several if not all Indians, there is a religious tradition of apologizing and honoring the animal at the end of a hunt.
And then eating him, because, well, why else would you do it?
Which is the part I have never understood about catch-and-release fishing. It just seems kind of sadistic, particularly since only one of you knows it's not the real deal.
Sparing the animal's life at the last minute in order to avoid being cruel is like leaving off the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae in order to avoid gaining weight.
It is Nero, feeling generous for having given a thumb's-up sign to spare a wounded, defeated gladiator. The real gesture of kindness would have been to release him before the bout. This is just a prideful demonstration of power.
In my always humble opinion, of course. But I think the choice you should make is between the flyrod and the camera. If you want to observe fish, observe away.
You can even craft flies to see if you can fool a trout into trying to eat one, but why put a hook in it, unless your intention is to hurt the trout and scare the living crap out of him and then bail out at the moment of truth out of "sensitivity"?
Now, if you are freeing him so you can do it to him all over again, that's cool.
But it's kind of like beating and robbing a guy but not killing him so that, next payday, you can rob him again: I understand the practical aspect of the business model, but you shouldn't expect to be thanked for being merciful.
Since the beginning of the conservation movement, there have been two paths: One of responsible consumption of resources and one of total preservation of resources.
And bestriding those approaches is the colossal figure of Theodore Roosevelt, friend to both John Burroughs and John Muir, and an avid hunter, co-founder (along with George Bird Grinnell) of the Boone and Crockett Club, and someone always willing to learn.
In fact, he met Grinnell when the editor of "Forest and Stream" magazine wrote a review of TR's "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" in which he said it was charming and entertaining, even though it was full of errors since the author didn't seem terribly experienced or knowledgeable. TR stormed into his office, but, when Grinnell pointed out his mistakes and they got to talking, a lifelong friendship sprang up that led to very positive results for Yellowstone, for the American bison and for many other conservation matters.
But conservation did not suddenly burst forth without an effort, and a learning curve.
For example, TR and others in the emerging movement had to learn that eradicating predators was not doing the deer and elk herds a favor. It seems odd today, but the "circle of life" factor needed to be understood by a people whose culture had grown up around sheep in a pen and the wolf prowling outside.
But they did learn and the movement evolved, and yet the two paths remained.
Roosevelt was great friends with John Burroughs, who had written a very influential piece for Atlantic Monthly, calling out the "nature fakers" like Ernest Thompson Seton, who wrote sentimental pieces that purported to be nonfiction but ascribed impossible emotional lives to animals.
TR and Burroughs made a memorable trip to Yellowstone together, and, in his book about the trip, Burroughs admits that he had hoped to hunt mountain lions with the President, but that TR was beginning to take enough heat from the public on that topic that no animals were injured in the making of their adventure.
And yet TR was also close friends with John Muir, a staunch preservationist whose relationship with nature was so sentimental as to be nearly rhapsodic.
When the two of them went camping in Yosemite, ditching reporters and White House staff as TR had done on his Yellowstone trip with Burroughs, Roosevelt was surprised and a bit shocked to find that Muir couldn't identify birds by their calls, something he had begun learning as a very small child.
What both the responsible-use advocates and the preservationists whom TR befriended had in common was that he felt he could learn from them. And Roosevelt never gave up his love of hunting, even as he tempered his views of how it all fits together in the grand scheme of nature and life.
For my part, I don't hunt, not because I think "Bambi" was a documentary, but because I don't feel I have standing.
I don't live in the woods, and the woods in which I grew up have changed to the point where I approach them as an affectionate stranger, and, to be honest, as one who didn't know them nearly as well even then as my contemporaries who have hiked, camped, fished and hunted in them as seamlessly as they went to school or put in a shift at work: As an integral part of their lives.
I guess you had to be there.
Meanwhile, here's a segment from Animal Planet's "North Woods Law" about the wardens in Maine whom I grew to know and respect when I lived there.
In fact, this segment is not only from Western Maine, where I lived, but from the very town in which I had my closest moose encounter, which was a lot briefer and with the moose a great deal more in control of things than in this demonstration of pragmatic conservationist compassion:
(Note: The code says auto play is disabled, but I see that it keeps going. Hit the stop button after this piece, or enjoy more highlights. The next one in line is pretty amusing.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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