To the editor:
We are saved.
Bob Barker has taken it upon himself to bear the Americans’ burden of saving the backward Canadians/Northern Ontarians from themselves.
Between him and Barry Kent MacKay of Born Free USA we will be saved and all will be well.
One of whom is from Washington, D.C. and the other from Hollywood. What a relief I don’t have to decide what I should eat. I don’t have to make these decisions anymore.
You make a lot of decisions every day. Some are more important that others, some are personal, some not so much. One of these decisions is what to eat. It is personal to me as what you consume is likely to you. Why though, I wonder, is it so much so to you? Why is the decision as to what I eat up to you? I ask you what type of foods should I eat? Organic? Should I eat from industrial farms, mono-cultured fields, and chemical laden soils? Soils and lands nourished by chemicals and leached by waters which do not reach the sea?
Should I eat foods pre-portioned and pre-packaged in plastic and styrofoam?
We say we know which diet is better for us, for the environment -- natural and organic, the 100-mile principle. Are they words to live by or platitudes to soothe our souls while we rape the world?
Do you know? Are insects revolting or a good source of protein? Are seals cute or edible?
The spring bear hunt raises all of these questions however none of the answers I feel have been given the airing they deserve. It has been said that I am wrong, that I am cruel, a Luddite because I eat wild meats; a neanderthal, because I do not embrace your beliefs.
Because I choose, and some would say have the courage, to know my food, to in some cases confront it, look it in the eye. I know what my food is, what it eats, where it came/comes from.
My relationship to what I call food is spiritual in many cases, whether I take it from the ground as berries or vegetables or kill it. I have a relationship with it; far beyond the Air Miles I may get for its purchase.
So you can say I am cruel, maybe I am. I do my own killing, I don’t ask you to do it for me, I don’t ask you to put my food in pretty packages.
Disguise it so I don’t see what it is, the death of something so that I may live. The spring bear hunt has been embraced as an example of the crudeness of the backwoods type of people in Northern Ontario, and as the slaughter of the innocent creatures causing immeasurable suffering starvation and according to some maybe even global warming.
I would like to lay out some facts regarding the spring bear hunt. One it is not a slaughter, it is a controlled regulated activity, very regulated. More regulated than the slaughter of deer, moose, mice, birds rabbits, you kill every day when we you drive.
Build your shopping malls, factory farms highways etc. etc. The animals that are legally taken are male, a very, very small percentage are female. It is highly illegal to take a female. Moreover the range these bears are taken at is close enough that identification is not difficult; bears do not wear pants. Not at least like the Hollywood bears Bob Barker knows so well.
The reason bears are hunted in the spring is that the amount of fat in the meat is minimal, it has been used up during hibernation; they are certainly not for trophies. Their weight is down, the hide is not good, so as a trophy they are not desirable; it is meat that they are taken for. Organic meat, naturally grown meat, naturally taken meat, not a bit of styrofoam to be seen.
Kevin Reiner,
Thunder Bay
