Hunting season has come back around, and I’m sure many of us have seen the scores of hunting pictures throughout our social media timelines. Hunters love to post their gruesome pictures of death all over the Internet in an effort to show off their corpse trophy. What I can’t understand is why hunters do this.
I understand the concept of hunting as a sport, and I’ve already made my amends with this barbaric tradition. As long as hunters properly dispose of the body and respect nature’s course by utilizing the animal’s body for food, I can breathe easy knowing their bodies aren’t just dumped in a creek.
As people of the South, many of us have tried deer meat sometime in our lives. I’ve only had it once as deer jerky, and it was truly the best thing I’ve ever tasted, which is ironic now considering my anti-mammal diet, but let the truth be known: Deer meat is tasty.
I understand if hunters want to hunt for sport and also take the meat home for jerky, stew, dinner, etc.
What I can’t back is this idea of glorification in and around death. Why must every hunter post a picture of themselves holding up the head of a dead animal? All I see is, “Look what I’ve done! I’ve successfully killed a defenseless animal with my human-made weapon!”
This idea of bragging for being a superior species is laughable. Of course a human killed a deer. We’ve killed plenty of deer for hundreds of years. It’s not anything new, and it’s certainly become easier now.
On top of accessibility, most times these hunters have killed deer several times throughout their life, so why must every kill need a picture?
It doesn’t make any sense, but added on is the complete disrespect these hunters are showing for nature. Humans tend to disregard nature all the time, but when people post pictures of themselves smiling with an animal’s corpse, the wound still drying with blood, the blank eyes of the animal staring back at you, it goes beyond hunting and onto humanity’s psychological obsession with death.
Do we take a picture of roadkill after hitting it with our car? Does any sane human take a picture with a corpse at a funeral? No, it’s disgusting and it’s unsettling. Death isn’t meant to be documented for the sake of social media. It’s not only a matter of decency, but it’s a matter of respect, not only for nature but for death itself.
Have I unfollowed these people? Yeah, I have, but that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. Maybe it’s a culture, or maybe it’s a fallacy in the human psychology, but it needs to end. For humanity’s sake, let’s not stare our own mortality in the face every time someone’s out in the woods shooting animals.
