Shooting a Giant Pig in the Head Does Not Make You a Hunter

In the simplest sense, "hunter," is a basic word denoting nothing more than a person or creature that stalks and kills something. But like with most human titles, the word "hunter" carries with it a long and honorific tradition, in this case of human ingenuity and cunning overcoming the harsh odds of the natural world to bring home food for survival.

There is dignity in our ancestral memory of hunting. There is no dignity in the way we carry it out today. Everyone lines up for a boxing match between two greats. Even those who hate sports can't help but become sucked into a last-second, all-or-nothing ending. But a fist battle between lets say, Mike Tyson and Stephen Hawking would generate only disturbed and perverted viewers.

In the sunny hills and dales of Dale Alabama's fenced in Lost Creek Plantation, a boy of eleven recently filled the role of the savage sure-thing. With his .50-caliber revolver in hand, and two severely over-armed hunting guides watching his back, the boy heroically shot the terrified , nine foot pig dubbed, Hogzilla-2 nine times as he chased it over the prescribed killing fields. In a moment of admirable manliness, the small boy finished the virtually tusk-less, and obviously extremely old boar with a point blank shot to the head.

"It feels really good," he told The Associated Press. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big."

Apparently, the prevailing idea amongst our modern "hunters" is that the bigger an animal, the more it needs "killin." This obviously draws back to our primitive need for food, and situations where the man who brought back the biggest chunk of meat was the top provider and inherently the dominant male of the group. Unfortunately this is simply a case of modern man tickling his ancient instincts at the expense of unsuspecting and usually unaggressive animals.

Guns alone don't necessarily take the honor out of hunting, neither does a fence, or a guide. But when you stack all three together you no longer have a hunt, you have a play-hunt. This point is no better exemplified by the photograph of the small boy perched over his massive slaughter. The idea that this pudgy-faced cherub could somehow defeat an ice-age sized boar is just too absurd for a sensible mind to deal with.

What the 11 year old did was no more impressive than any ordinary child winning a squirt-gun fight with his friends. If the seemingly tusk-less boar had turned to attack it would have been annihilated by the high powered rifles of the hunting guides.

Obviously the meaningless slaughter of modern hunting is insignificant to the meaningless slaughter of our food industry. We eat meat and we don't care what has to suffer for us to get it, but at least we don't pretend that there's anything honorable about it. "Hunters" wear their obnoxious, neon orange pride on their sleeves, even though their enterprise is nothing more than mental masturbation.