Sunday 2 August 2015

Anthropomorph


I took down last night's Cecil post because I suspected that the net would be saturated with righteous and indignant comments about it anyway, and I was not wrong. Then this morning, I heard someone say that everyone feels vindicated by joining in outcries like this in any case - all given from a safe distance - so I was glad I took it down. Enough is enough, not that anything we could do about it would ever be enough.

But, as ever is the case, I have now set myself on a train of thought which is difficult to put a stop to. As anyone will tell you, all my thoughts at the keyboard come straight out of my head via my fingers.

I don't belong to that smoothbore shooting club any more, but when I did I declined all invitations to go shooting pheasant on the grounds that I didn't like killing things for sport. I am quite happy to eat pheasant which has been shot this way, because I think that it is far better to eat meat which hasn't been clinically killed, but that's another issue.

I learned from one of the meanest members of this club that the only thing he spent large amounts of money on was to fly to Africa specifically to shoot the biggest examples of wildlife that he could - this was his idea of a holiday. I just cannot get to grips with this notion. Apparently, the only reason that the dentist did not shoot an elephant was because they couldn't find one big enough for him.

It's like all those fishing magazines which have someone cradling a 3 foot fish with a massive grin on his face. Why is it that when anyone has the bad grace to pose next to an animal whose life they have just abruptly ended, they have to have stupid grins on their faces? Whenever I have killed something, it takes a couple of hours before I can muster up a smile, but these people are often even laughing jubilantly whilst using the corpse as a gun-rack. It's not just men either, though it usually is.

Anyway, I'll end up with a joke I heard this morning:

A woman wants to buy a parrot so she goes into the pet shop. She sees a fine specimen and asks how much it costs. £20 comes the answer, so she asks why it is so cheap. The owner explains that it used to live in a brothel and has a somewhat fruity vocabulary. She buys it and takes it home, putting it in the living room.

When the wraps come off the cage, the parrot looks around and says, "Hmm. new brothel. very nice."

When her two daughters arrive home and go in, the parrot says, "Ooh look - two new girls. Very nice."

When her husband comes home, the parrot says, "Hello Keith!"

18 comments:

  1. Between thinking about what I was going to say (and what you were actually saying) last night about Cecil and going to bed and waking up later to say something the post had gone. I thought I might write about it myself this morning but now I wont because I wouldn't have done it much justice anyway. I think what we are all giving is one great big outpouring of guilt about what we do in this world and Cecil gives us that moment to say so and then we feel better and go back to what we were doing and forget it all and chuck down a piece of litter and don't bother to see that in fact lots of lions like Cecil are shot everyday. Perhaps I should have written a post about it after all.

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    1. You more or less did with the above. These are all the reasons why I took that post down. I sort of became ashamed of myself.

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  2. I wondered if you took down the post because of conflicting reports about the death of Jericho, and the story, like our morals, has become too muddied. But for a moment a bright light was focused on another bit of human stupidity.

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    1. Yes, there was conflicting info, but that is the nature of media - the race to get stuff out. 1st they said it was not his brother, then today they said he was, again.

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  3. I just despair of the world and all its stupidity Tom - I often feel like staying at home, never reading a newspaper and never listening to the news.

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    1. I thought that was what you did anyway, Weave?

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  4. Loved the joke
    I will obviously stral it

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  5. I thought you meant the post about Colin and I couldn't understand what was so wrong or shaming about it. I was busy helping Mr EM celebrate his birthday and must have missed the Cecil post. Though I did see section of a CNN report about Cecil that stated," Jericho, his brother, also a lion, " which I thought was very funny.

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  6. I used to (try to) shoot, but was useless at it. I used to kill my own chickens, and was quite good at it. Now I could do neither.

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    1. I was a vegetarian for years, but ate meat only after I was prepared to kill it myself, but never have done. It always involves sport for game, unless you go on a rough shoot for only one bird.

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  7. I go down to the local pet food shop on my meat run. I buy bones for the dog and fresh kangaroo fillet for myself.

    Friends think it is strange when I tell them them I buy my meat from the pet food shop, but it's no farming, no abattoirs. It's always wild lean meat, killed purely for its protein value.

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    1. Aborigines can't be wrong after 30,000 years.

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  8. I think they grin so stupidly because they feel that they would have been lost in a fair fight - some sort of caught- being-a-smug-coward grin (I've seen that in found-out cheaters too).

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    1. You could be right, Britta, but I don't want to go inside their heads to find out.

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