Save our Forests

Todd Forrest says: "It's wise to drive cautiously where there are lots of deer." Photo by Tod Seelie

Hey, guess what? I blew a bear's fucking head off and it felt awesome. It's the kind of thing that makes your mouth say, "Holy shit" without your brain's permission. It also makes you feel a strange and cruel kinship with nature (kind of like when the Bad Brains would hang out with Nazi skinheads). I used to hate hunting. When I was a kid I saw a deer dying in the woods with half its ass missing. My first instinct was, "Man and nature don't mix. Man bad, nature good." Which is true, but what about if they already have mixed? What do we do then? Every time an ocean liner returns from the Black Sea its hull brings in some fucked-up foreign species that devastates our biodiversity. That's how zebra mussels came to take over the Great Lakes. Or what about the more than 200 million starlings bullying our native birds out of their nests and taking over the continent? They're here because some douchebag decided to bless New York City with every bird mentioned in a Shakespearean play. He's done the environment more harm than hunters could ever do. We have more in common with vegetarians than you think. Do you have any idea how much duck hunters have done for wetland preservation? Don't take my word for it. Ask some Northeastern farmers about the deer population. They call them "giant squirrels" now. Herds, 70 deep, are eating every berry farm and residential garden from Halifax to Washington, DC. Collisions with cars have gone up 65% in the past two years alone. Ironically, it's all the hunting of mountain lions and wolves that got us to this sad state of affairs, and now the deer need someone to cull them. How about me? New Jersey has just instituted bear-hunting licenses for the first time in almost 50 years. Farmers in upstate New York are getting cull licenses for the first time ever. Shit, even the yuppies down in L.A. are killing the coyotes that ate their cats. Hunting is a sad side effect of today's environment. You can either sit in the shower crying about it or grab a gun and jump into the fray. Trust me, trying to fix our previous wrongs is the best job a man could ask for, and once you've caused your first death you'll be hooked for life.