June 10, 2007

• Thanks for asking.

  I am getting great blog mileage ["bloggage"?] out of the remains of the poached moose that were dumped in our cul de sac… almost as much as we got out of the moose that Doug killed in our front yard when it was stomping our dog Koji, and that we helped local knifemaker Dancing Bear butcher to get it out of the path to our door.

  First, I got surreal pictures.  Then, when, by request, I explained those images and kvetched about censorship of my first video, I got more questions to answer.

  Prissy wanted to know:

  “…is there nothing that can be done about this,,, if they are killing animals out of season, if caught can they not be prosecuted?”

  Yes, Alaska’s fish and wildlife laws are strict, and they are enforced.  Illegally taking game can result in fines and imprisonment, in addition to forfeiture of any guns and other equipment used in the crime, including vehicles.  There is also a law forbidding trophy hunting without salvaging the animal’s meat.

  Prissy commented on my strong stomach, too.  I guess it is true I have one.  Stuff just doesn’t bother me.  I think part of my lack of squeamishness is the result of my being relatively free of fear.  I’m not scared of bugs, snakes, pain, death, the dark, the unknown… it’s a long list.  You name it, and if I have not already transcended the fear it is only because I haven’t become aware of it.  If I uncover and recognize a fear, I transcend it.  Life is ever so much easier this way.

  Another factor in the “strength” of my stomach could be my conscious control over my gag reflex and other physical things that most people don’t bother controlling.  I didn’t need to suppress any reflex this time, didn’t experience any nausea or revulsion, but the last time I got motion sick, in a stretch of rough water coming home from my honeymoon, on the ferry through the Inside Passage, when everyone else was puking over the rail, I just told myself it was pointless, I didn’t need to.

  Smarticus wrote:

  I
  know that you expend a great deal of time cultivating detachment from
  various things (pain, guilt, judgemental-ness), but did it irk you at
  all that someone killed the cow out of season, and then didn’t bother
  utilizing more of her, or even butchering the calf?  It seems like a
  waste to me.

  Also as an aside, moose scare the holy hell out of me.  I am always
  amazed at how many people will just assume that herbivores are, you
  know, *nice*.  When I read your blogs about where you live, I really
  like the fact that I live in California where it’s not so cold and dark
  and there are no damned bears or big huge moose.

  It really doesn’t take any great expenditure of time, and the farther I go on this quest to transcend fear and practice universal unconditional love, the less effort it requires.  I only need to be in touch with myself, aware of my feelings and reactions, and to remind myself of the reality of Oneness if I happen to slip into the illusion of separateness. 

  I did look up “irk” to make sure I understand the question.  Wordnet says it means, “gall: irritate or vex.”  So, no, it didn’t irk me.  Doug had told me about someone dumping moose bones and guts in the cul de sac, and my trip that day was specifically to look at them.  There was no surprise, and consequently no reaction, until I got close enough to see behind the cow’s humongous ribcage and saw the beautiful, slender brown legs of the calf.  What I felt then was a sad, “awww, a cow… with a baby.”  I think some maternal instinct was involved there.

  I was reared to deplore waste.  There is Scots ancestry on both sides of my family, as well as Cherokee and Hunkpapa: peoples who make (or made) whistles and game pieces out of bones, rattles from hooves, and who wear claws and feathers as ornaments.  But in the here and now, reality sometimes makes it difficult to, for example, save a moosehide.  Neither Dancing Bear, nor I, nor anyone he knew in Talkeetna, was equipped to deal with the hide of that moose that Doug had to shoot a few winters ago.  If the person who killed this cow and calf was a weekender out here from Anchorage, he certainly would not be equipped to stretch, flense, and tan a hide.

  Letting parts of an animal become carrion and go to scavengers, is only “waste” from a narrow human perspective.  This was a realization I “got” a decade or two ago when I was doing a lot of gardening and composting.  It would irk me extremely if, for example, one or two apples out of a bag I bought would be bad, or if I’d not eat the carrots fast enough and they’d rot.  Then one day in the garden as I spread my compost, I heard these words in my mind, “It’s all one Earth.”  Ever after, when I’d feel that touch of guilt, blame, regret or whatever, upon pitching something in the compost, I’d repeat those words to myself and let it go.  This does not in any way keep me from working to minimize “waste,” it just keeps me from feeling bad about it.

  In this case, I don’t really know what was left behind for the scavengers.  I didn’t move the calf to see if it had been gutted for the delicacies of heart and liver.  Nor did I wrestle with the cow’s head to learn whether her tongue (my favorite part) had been taken.  I sorta suspect from the sheer bulk of that gutpile that they threw away the liver, heart and other organs, but I don’t know that for a fact.  It doesn’t matter.  Whatever they left behind, something will eat.  One reason I didn’t try to move the calf was that I might have disturbed some rodent(s) that had burrowed into it for a feast.  Marten bites, or ermine, or even shrew bites, can be serious, and the ones with rabies are more likely to be aggressive when disturbed.

  I don’t, strictly speaking, know if this incident was technically “poaching.”  The only way it is permissible to kill a game animal out of season is in defense of life or property.  That was what Doug was doing when he killed the moose in our yard.  It might have been the case with that cow and calf.  Cows are aggressive when they have young calves, especially if someone happens to get between the calf and its mother.  If one of my neighbors or a weekender did shoot the cow in self-defense, then killing the dependent calf would have been an act of mercy.  If that was the case, the only crimes were failure to report the killing and illegal disposal of the remains.

  Even if it was a true poaching, an opportunistic out-of-season killing for meat, and even if the person who did it was motivated more by economy and/or a taste for wild game, rather than the necessity to feed a hungry family, who am I to judge or blame?  What does it gain me?  How does it serve me?  At most, I feel that the choice of parkland as a dump site was infra dig, but there could be some logical reasons why the killer was afraid to be out on the highway with the illegal haul.  Fear, however self-defeating and futile, is often very logical.

  I have to agree with Smarticus about the foolishness of assuming that herbivores are harmless.  Just because they won’t eat you, that doesn’t mean they won’t maim or kill you if they feel threatened by you.  I felt confident once that I could fend off a young bear with a broom, and I was proven correct.  But the winter when snow was so deep that the moose were maddened with starvation and couldn’t get out of our plowed roads and driveways, I let my experienced friends persuade me to carry a gun when I walked Doug to and from the school bus stop.  I’m glad I did, because it saved me from an enraged charging bull moose.

  Yeah, as I said, the moose remains in the cul de sac didn’t irk me.  I must admit, however, that Smarticus damning our bears did irk me momentarily, but I got over it.

  

  • 6:31 pm
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