Paul Theroux: The bloody rise of the vote hunter
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 neighbour's horses".
Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and fanciful: "They made me think of great frightened rabbits"; "It reminded me at once of the camelopard". And he alludes to the moose's "branching and leafy horns - a sort of fucus or lichen in bone". In all these 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, like Thoreau, whose every word is at odds with their grovelling and grandstanding, and their sanctimonious cant. Think of the average politician today and then reflect on how Thoreau had no time for organised religion, how he mocked clergymen, jeered at missionaries, warmongers and Bible-thumpers. He was a defender of John Brown and the rebellious spirit in American life, and especially 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 and sign-carriers outside the Republican convention in St Paul. He would have mocked the people inside. He would have denounced the prison at Guantánamo. He wrote against injustice; he despised politicians and hunters.
And yet, as we saw at the Republican convention, hunting seems to define a certain species of American politician. It's nothing new. When Teddy Roosevelt left office he travelled to Africa, and - in the role of evil twin to the Biblical Noah - hunted down and killed two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of 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 ..." ...
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Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and fanciful: "They made me think of great frightened rabbits"; "It reminded me at once of the camelopard". And he alludes to the moose's "branching and leafy horns - a sort of fucus or lichen in bone". In all these 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, like Thoreau, whose every word is at odds with their grovelling and grandstanding, and their sanctimonious cant. Think of the average politician today and then reflect on how Thoreau had no time for organised religion, how he mocked clergymen, jeered at missionaries, warmongers and Bible-thumpers. He was a defender of John Brown and the rebellious spirit in American life, and especially 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 and sign-carriers outside the Republican convention in St Paul. He would have mocked the people inside. He would have denounced the prison at Guantánamo. He wrote against injustice; he despised politicians and hunters.
And yet, as we saw at the Republican convention, hunting seems to define a certain species of American politician. It's nothing new. When Teddy Roosevelt left office he travelled to Africa, and - in the role of evil twin to the Biblical Noah - hunted down and killed two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of 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 ..." ...