Hunting for Trophies

Hunting for Trophies

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
An article in Field and Stream entitled Fierce Objects of Desire and written by Thomas McIntyre had the following passage: Before Cecil became the most universally mourned lion since Disney's Mufasa, trophy hunting had another face. One was that of a Michigander in a Borsalino hat, an archer by the name of Bear. Others were named Hemingway, Ruark, and Roosevelt. These were the recognizable faces of a tradition of ethics and respect toward wild animals and hunting. Now, the public face of trophy hunting has been transfigured, like Jekyll to Hyde, into that of a beaming bowhunting doctor of dentistry from Minnesota. I brought up the subject with Colin Kearns Senior Deputy Editor of Field and Stream: "I had a debate with a young lady who took a trophy, beautiful muley out here and the reason I had a debate with her was the day before I did the story there was an op Ed piece in the local paper saying, why shoot trophies? Let the trophies go. The meat is better on a doe or cow. So now we see this article 'Fierce Objects of Desire". Put that together for me. Let me put this into context. The theme of this issue is the trophy issue. Trophy is a word that means something different to pretty much every hunter or fisherman that there is, whether it be that the trophy is the meat, the trophy is the experience. There are hunters where the trophy is the animal itself and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you shoot a big deer or big elk or catch a big fish, congratulations. That's a huge accomplishment. This story is a deep diving, cerebral type thing.
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