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The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said, 'Fox hunting is cruel and I therefore want it banned.' He went on to discuss the option of controlling foxes by shooting with a rifle. He suggested that that method was preferred in the Burns report. However, nowhere in that report, so far as I can see, does any conclusion suggest that fox hunting is cruel. I defy the noble Lord to find a reference in the Burns report that says that fox hunting is cruel. It does not say that anywhere. Therefore, the only conclusion to draw is that fox hunting is not cruel.
As Americans, we have a long history with firearms. We also have a government built on compromise, so here is the compromise I propose: Ban assault rifles and handguns for everyone except police and military personnel. These weapons are made to kill humans and should be strictly limited. At the same time, allow responsible citizens to own rifles and shotguns. Rifles are for hunting big-game animals, shotguns are for hunting birds; non-automatic versions of these weapons should be available for those with an interest in hunting or target shooting.
Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana, they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.
If you wait through long, cold hours in the November woods with a bow in your hands hoping a buck will show or if you spend days walking in the African bush trailing Cape buffalo while listening to lions roar, you’re sure to learn hunting isn’t about killing. Nature actually humbles you. Hunting forces a person to endure, to master themselves, even to truly get to know the wild environment. Actually, along the way, hunting and fishing makes you fall in love with the natural world. This is why hunters so often give back by contributing to conservation.
It's amazing being a member of perhaps the last analog generation - being born in the late '40s, growing up in the '50s and '60s, when it was still a very analog world. And in New Orleans those days, the country was just next door, as it were. You didn't have to travel miles and miles to get out in the woods. There's tons of fishing, obviously, in New Orleans, and tons of hunting. That was part of the cycle of life, to get fresh meat from the butcher or go duck hunting and get it yourself. It wasn't malicious or insensitive. It was just there, and you used it.
Everyone was like, "Why do you need to meet someone on Match.com?" My response was, "I certainly don't need to meet more of the same broke, acting class guys that I'd been dating my whole life." I needed to change that whole paradigm. So, I decided to meet some corporate guys and see how that worked. So, I went on Match, but I didn't put a picture up, because I'm on television, and I didn't want anybody contacting me for the wrong reasons. So, I had to do the hunting, as it were. I didn't anticipate meeting my husband online, but there he was. And it all worked out!
The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion...expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew.
The idea that hunting is one against one is ludicrous. It's one animal versus the hunter, the manufacturer of the rifle, the bullet maker, the designer and manufacturer of the telescopic sight, the auto manufacturer who made the car the hunter got to the edge of the wild in, the maker of his waterproof shoes, the various manufacturers of his mittens, glasses, overcoat - and that's only the beginning of the list. The "sportsman" who shoots an animal should then make a speech, like the actor who wins an Oscar does, thanking the multitudes behind the scenes who made this "victory" possible.
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
