I read this comment on another website and thought it was rather interesting.

"An instructor pointed out to me that once you are four generations away from your agricultural base, you lose touch with life and reality. Hence farm boys and girls understand the cycle of life, plants and critters. City folks think you can get everything from a supermarket and that killing is cruel. More liberals in the cities than country."

This comment is duly noted.

Frankly I think it is closer to two or three generations.

I am looking at a number of people I grew up with and see that very few people went into any fields that involved growing things or working with animals in one form or another.. 

I can think of a small time dairy farmer, and a couple of  fisherman. That's about it.

I know of a social worker, a few teachers, an attorney, a small buisnessman. Incidentally the small businessman has run a small town type lumberyard for years and it is still there. He managed to survive a Lowe's and  Home Depot moving into town and that speaks voumes for him. More than one became teachers and returned to the same school system they had left after college. (I wonder about that. I've covered  this one before. Holy Welcome Back, Kotter.)

The bottom line is that a lot of people I grew up with have strayed away from being close to nature and look at things far differently than those of us that have lived in the out of doors.

Personally I have lived in a couple of far-flung remote outposts. I've also spent a period of time in bear country where I had no electricity or running water. The simple act of answering nature's call meant grabbing a shotgun to take with me. Food, stored away from camp in a tree, was brought into camp, cooked immediately, eaten and the scraps were discarded far away from camp.

It seems that most of my peers grew up living entirely in a man-made world and have not been near how the natural part of the world works.

I suppose they think that meat and produce comes from the back room of a supermarket or something along these lines.

Several years ago I mentioned that venison was a part of y diet and that I occasionally shot a deer to fill the freezer. The person I told that to seemed upset and called it barbaric and cruel in one breath and in the next they told me about the Angus steaks they had ordered from a butcher someplace.

They called me barbaric for harvesting a game animal with a clean kill in one breath and bragged about the product of a slaughterhouse in the next. Apparently they have never seen where that beautiful Angus steak comes from. 

I've also heard of a hunter being chided for killing a poor animal by someone in a Burger King parking lot as the accuser was on their way in to wolf down on a BK triple or two made of greasy beef that someone else at a meat packing plant had killed.

Incidentally wild venison is generally a lot healthier than ranch raised beef. For one thing it is lower in cholesterol.

Slaughterhouses are outright nasty to watch. They simply kill animals systematically, one right after the other. It's a processing line of killing, yet harvesting a game animal seems barbaric to them. Those animals know their demise is coming and often die panicked deaths. A deer, properly harvested,  simply drops dead.

Incidentally a farm butchered hog or cow generally dies quickly and humanely.

To an outdoorsman, venision or other wild game is simply do-it-yourself meat. To someone that has been detatched from nature they simply can't fathom doing their own butchering.

People that are removed from nature seem to develop a strange sense of reality. They tend to grow dependent on others to do their dirty work. Many of them go so far as to make fun of and look down on those that do the behind the scenes work to make their lives simpler.

I used to watch eagles along Cannery Row in Kodiak swoop down on sea gulls and other birds. Swoop, bam! dead!

Animals in the wild have a food chain and it is as simple as that. Four or five generations away from the agricultural base  and a couple of Walt Disney movies later and these people now believe that the animals in the woods are one big happy family.

Incidentally I read somewhere that someone claimed that a deer was trying to find a bear to help him. Truth is, the bear, given the chance, would relish the opportunity to meet the deer up close and personal because it would give the bear a pretty good venison meal with leftovers to boot.

You can tell who is who in a heartbeat simply by carrying a deer home and listening. If you pass someone listen. If you hear digestive juices flowing the person is likely a country person that is close to the farm or not too far away.

If you hear them sob "You killed Bambi!" they've been a couple generations away from the farm.

My late father-in-law was a farm kid and it never left him even though he graduated from college and worked for a major corporation. He wasn't a hunter, but understood it.

It was fun one Christmas time when we went to a place that had hay rides. We didn't go for one but when he saw the Belgiums that were pulling the wagon his face lit up and he headed straight for them. It was special watching his face light up as he petted and examined them and for the rest of the evening it was all he spoke of.

Here was a man that had been a corporate type for his entire career that had simply slipped back into his childhood roots. It was wonderful to watch.

It was also interesting listening to the way he spoke about my cat. He simply picked him up and examined him with sure, kind hands. the cat, Tokie, who generally didn't like people too much responded by letting him examine him, which was rare.

He never slighted me for hunting or commercial fishing as he understood the real ways of the world. He understood nature  because as a farm kid he had to. It was the family livelihood. It was ingrained in him as an infant.

I can't say we were friends, but we respected each other in matters involving nature, working with tools and basic economics. He said the death of this country would be debt and I can't say he was far off.

He sure wasn't too far off the farm he grew up on, either.



To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY