Ever pleasant Guest and Ake,

I'm beginning to think that this has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with guns.

Do you have the same feeling about men who run slaughter houses and butcher animals that have been raised in feed stalls and force feed
to bloat in favor of high yields and maximum profit? (Do you avoid Big Macs in protest or just eat Tofu burgers. If they are so good, why are the called Garden burgers and Tofu Pups?)

If so, express it so the beef farmers in the group can join the debate.

Fox hunting, gun ownership, opening day for trout, big game hunting, Archery, black powder, first buck. These are all rituals that we have as a part of our human and cultural tradition. Many of these things measured a rite of passage for young men. Some indicated the change of the season. Do we still hunt wrens or just sing the songs? Some were done to celebrate harvests or successful breeding seasons.

Eventually barbaric rites like fox hunting fall by the way side along with sactioned cock fighting in the US and the annual seal pup clubbing by some countries. (Saddly not all have given up the seal hunt yet.) Maybe they all will in time. And I think that with each ritual and tradition that passes we are the less for it. We are that much further away from what we were and we know a little less about us to pass on.

I'm not suggesting that every now and them we burn the odd witch or rape and plunder a few Saxon villages as rite of passage. But I do suggest that we be less anxious to do away, out of hand things that others value even tho' we find them personally distasteful.

Don