Protests & Pit Hair

I reeled out of my first Dallas Safari Club Convention like a lush at closing time, having drunk my fill of bespoke rifles and exotic hunts. I staggered smack dab into a handful of protesters. Had any of the liberal news media been present, I’m sure that handful would have been described as hundreds, but alas, there wasn’t a reporter in sight that unseasonably warm January afternoon. I was weaving my way through their whining when one of the protesters, a wormy guy wearing skinny jeans, muttered under his breath and in my general direction: 

“Bears got a right to live, too, man.“

His comment stopped me dead in my tracks, and I gave him my full attention, a courtesy he clearly wasn’t anticipating. The look on his face let me know that the guy wasn’t comfortable with direct eye contact and the tone in his voice told me he wasn’t particularly passionate about the protest. In fact, I was wondering why the guy was there at all when I caught him chancing a glance at a woman in the crowd who was sporting a tank top and screaming obscenities. Something in his glance suggested he might have a thing for her. When she pivoted our direction and raised the protest sign in her hands above her head, I got an up close and personal look at the greasy hair in her armpits. Easy to see why the guy was so smitten.

In that moment, I was tempted to stop and explain myself to the wormy guy in the skinny jeans, to share with the poor sap the profound impact that hunting has had on my life and character. 

I was tempted to teach him some of the life lessons that hunting has taught me, important lessons that I believed the guy might well benefit from; lessons like recognizing which way the wind is blowing so that a man can position himself accordingly or remembering that a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. 

I was tempted to try to describe for the guy, right there in the spot, the sensation that I believe all hunters feel when we line up a long-awaited shot, when we take up that last ounce of trigger pull, when we absorb first our rifle’s recoil and then the subsequent rush of adrenaline, when we deposit yet another experience in our memory banks to draw from when life threatens to become monotonous and mundane.

I was tempted to try to reason with the guy in the hope that I might be able to change his mind and maybe even win him over.

But after spending the last seven hours walking the length and breadth of the Dallas Safari Club’s annual convention, after poring over plains game price lists for African safaris and shouldering firearms whose asking prices were higher than the value of my house, I was hungry and I was tired and I still had a long drive home ahead of me. 

All of that was working against the guy, plus the fact that I neither felt then nor feel now any obligation whatsoever to explain my motivations as a hunter to anyone, much less some wormy guy wearing skinny jeans who had made up his mind about the time honored tradition of hunting without seemingly ever having actually stepped foot in the outdoors. Besides, if his girlfriend’s armpits couldn’t convince the guy that his judgment was impaired, nothing I could say was ever going to.