Getting In Touch With Your Inner Elmer Fudd

Here I am, at the computer, pounding my brain against the keyboard, trying to think of something to write.

“Dearest God of muses and creativity, breathe your essential nectar into my soul, so I may continue to inspire the languishing masses with my mediocre writing skills, and collect undeserved paychecks.”

And there, as if on cue, a flock of wild turkeys crosses the road and starts to pick all the rye grass seeds out of my garden.

I wouldn’t mind shooting one of them, but I don’t own a gun. So I have to settle for running out and scaring them away, which is fun (it turns out turkeys do fly), but it doesn’t help me with Thanksgiving Dinner.

If you’re like me, you would rather shoot your own food than have it delivered to you via an inefficient system of corporate farming and trucking that leaves a larger carbon footprint than the entire city of Houston, Texas.

While it may be hard for us animal lovers to pull the trigger on Bambi’s mommy or daddy, it’s better than contributing to the cruelty, torture, and corruption of the meat industry.

(When you hear the word “slaughterhouse,” do you think happy thoughts? No. There’s a reason for that.)

Therefore, everyone should learn to hunt.

Think about it: if every family in America got its meat from hunting instead of from the grocery store, we’d run out of wildlife faster than you could look up “cannibalism” on Google.

With everyone eating each other, the daunting problem of unfettered global population growth would go away on its own.

The alternative would be giving up meat. Ha! As if.

Widespread vegetarianism is hardly a realistic choice, even if it would result in a much more efficient food distribution system.

So I’ve decided to learn how to hunt. But there’s a problem. I come from the generation that can’t learn anything without the help of the Internet, and when you look up hunting on the Internet, you get very scared.

It turns out hunters get up very early, like 3 a.m., an hour when no human should ever wake up longer than it takes to fish a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge.

Hunting is expensive. Every hunter has his own lucky combination of deer-urine scents, skinning and dressing knives, binoculars, camouflage, and blaze orange, which have the combined effect of making the deer double over with helpless mocking laughter, which makes them much easier to shoot.

The best site out there for hunters is www.maine-hunting-camp.com, where you can find all kinds of useful stuff, including pictures of guys named Leon and Bert posing with recent kills. They also have links to hunting tips and video of a guy dressing a whitetail doe.

I thought “dressing” meant he had some pretty blouses and panty hose for it to try on. Turns out I have a lot more to learn.

Instead, he unseamed the poor animal and scooped out her entrails, all the while narrating his actions as if he was hosting his own show on the Food Network.

“Hear that? That’s gasses escaping.”

“I’m pushing down on the intestines as I slice through the meaty portion, to keep them out of the way.”

“Now I’m going to reach up and grab the esophagus and pull it down as far as I can.”

Yeah… maybe I’ll learn to hunt next year.