Put-and-Take

Here I am, at my parents' house celebrating our Thanksgiving. It's our first time splitting our holidays, and this season it's Thanksgiving at my husband's parents, Christmas at mine.

About an hour ago, my dad informed me of a bizarre hunting practice he participated in a couple years ago, and I feel compelled to blog about it.

This practice is called "Put-and-Take." I'll call it PnT for short.

In my dad's words, a PnT is

a type of pheasant hunt where the owners of the birds and property "put" the birds out right before

you get there to "take" them (via shotgun).

Essentially, hunters desiring to shoot a couple pheasants prepay for the birds they want to shoot. Then, they go out to the designated quarter-mile "hunting" space and "hunt" for their birds. From my dad's story:

We stood out on the road and watched as the owner drove thru [sic] the property and took birds out

of cages in the back of the truck as they came thru [the property] towards us. They shook each bird

to put them in a daze before placing them on the ground behind a bush or clump of wood, etc. We then

proceeded to walk thru [sic] and shoot.

I was so appalled that I had him tell the story a couple more times — and I eventually made him write it down — just so that I was sure that what I thought I heard was what I actually heard.

I am not a fan of hunting, mostly because I do not understand the appeal of sitting in the forest motionless for several hours simply to kill a living creature, not to mention the idea of killing an animal in general. However, when I hear my father describe what hunting means to him, his perspective does soften my views about it. I know that he loves the experience of being in the woods and "becoming one with nature," in addition to harvesting what he eats (there is a lot of preparation that goes into hunting, and it is also satisfying to him to execute the planning successfully [i.e., when he kills a dear, like he did this year]. Thus, it is a spiritual and somewhat primitive practice.

Let us now return to PnT. How does that have anything to do with the aforementioned aspects of hunting? One does not sit in the woods and become one with nature, and there is no real preparation for the experience on the part of the hunter. PnT does not have anything to do with traditional hunting other than the act of slaughtering animals.

PnT is horrible. Why do I think it's horrible? Because it lacks the spiritual, natural characteristics of traditional hunting, and is, thus, simply an exercise in brutality?