The great American writer found nothing heroic in hunting the gentle creatures. Rather, he saw their killing as a great tragedy.
By Paul Theroux
September 14, 2008
All this talk about moose hunting! It is as though, because of the animal's enormous size and imposing antlers, bringing one down is a heroic feat of marksmanship. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in "The Maine Woods," killing these big, gentle, myopic creatures is more "like going out by night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbor's horses."
Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and fanciful. "They made me think of great frightened rabbits," he wrote, and he alluded to the moose's "branching and leafy horns -- a sort of fucus or lichen in bone."
In all his descriptions there is affection and awe. The killing of a moose is, in Thoreau's view, always a tragedy. He witnessed one being shot, and "nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose." In another passage, Thoreau grudgingly acknowledges that moose are hunted by Indians out of necessity -- for their meat, for their hides, as part of Indian custom and tradition. This was in 1853.
American politicians seldom take notice of American writers, especially the boldest ones, such as Thoreau, whose every word is at odds with their groveling and grandstanding and their sanctimonious cant. Think of the average politician today and then reflect on how Thoreau had no time for organized religion, how he mocked clergymen and jeered at missionaries, warmongers and Bible-thumpers. He was a defender of John Brown and the rebellious spirit in American life, a proponent of human rights.
He hated the thought of the wilderness being opened to development; he wrote scathingly of lumberjacks and logging operations. He would have cheered the demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention in St Paul, Minn. He would have mocked the people inside. He would have denounced the prison at Guantanamo. He wrote against injustice; he despised politicians and hunters.
And yet hunting seems to define a certain species of American politician. It's nothing new. When Teddy Roosevelt left office, he traveled to Africa and -- in the role of evil twin to the biblical Noah -- hunted and killed two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of the southern Sudan: total bag, 512 creatures. In his account of the safari, "African Game Trails" (1910), he wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number ... ."
"Infinite" is credulous hyperbole -- many of those animals are now extinct or severely endangered. Take the bongo, a large African antelope -- nearly as large as a moose -- now almost gone because of hunters and poachers. In Uganda, where it roamed in sizable numbers when I lived there, it has been wiped out. Maurice Stans, the Nixon administration Commerce secretary and Watergate defendant, helped to eradicate this gentle animal when, in the 1960s, he sicced his dogs on them -- the conventional way to corner a bongo -- then presumably gestured to his gun bearer ("Here is your bunduki, bwana") and shot two of them as trophies. It was not an incidental act: Maurice Stans defined himself politically as a big-game hunter.
more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-theroux14-2008sep14,0,4501486.story
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