Stalking the Wild And Wooly Burger

By Jim Fitzgerald Originally Published May 27, 1976

The people of Columbia have been rescued from being beaked to death by rampaging doves.

And for writing that smartie sentence, I will have to explain once again how I can eat hamburgers.

It happens all the time.

I can’t understand how hunters can enjoy killing. I laugh when they claim they are “harvesting a crop,” not killing. I ask them why I’ve never seen a farmer drive through town with a bushel of rutabagas tied to his fender, headed for the newspaper office to have his picture taken with his vanquished vegetables?

And the hunters can’t understand how I can enjoy eating steak if I am against killing animals. They laugh when I claim slaughterhouses won’t bother me until they are featured on TV’s American Sportsman with Rock Hudson knocking the steer’s brains out with a golden hammer. They ask me how I can be so dumb as to not realize dead is dead, meat is meat, and there’s not enough ketchup to change the taste?

It is a great and frequent argument which I’ve never won, or lost. And it’s nothing personal. Some of my best friends go hunting all the time. When they return home, they always assure me they never fired a shot for fear of hitting a waitress. But I think they are just trying to spare my Bambi stomach. I have been known to throw up on newspaper photos of snake hunts.

My favorite opponent is Preston Mann who operates the Hunters Creek hunting preserve about 50 miles north of Detroit. It is a slick operation with every convenience for outdoorsmen who don’t have time to go outdoors. Mann’s pheasants are trained to fly into the pockets of lunching auto executives and commit suicide.

Mann does not take my barbs peaceable. In fact, he is master of the weird debate and I don’t have a prayer in one-on-one combat. Just recently his local newspaper quoted him as revealing that I am actually a closet blood-sporter who lusts after innocent animals. Mann said he discovered my killer instinct during several years of watching me eat at his club. He said he could tell by the glint in my eyes and the slobber on my lips every time I bite into a cheeseburger, rare.

I mention this as some sort of solace to all you hunters out there who, after reading this column, will want to send me nasty words. Don’t bother, I’ve heard them all from master Mr. Mann. If he can’t make me see the light at the end of the deer run, nobody can.

I can understand why Preston might think I eat meat with inordinate enjoyment. But he mistakes haste for lasciviousness. When dining at Preston’s, I always eat the meat quickly before someone shoots it.

Actually Mann’s customers win points from me for honesty. They don’t give you any harvesting baloney about killing to thin the herd or protect the grain. They go to hunting preserves for birds the same way their wives go to the A&P for pork chops.

The birds are there to be killed, no other reason, and the hunter pays for every bird released in front of his gun. If he misses the first shot, the besttrained birds keep circling until hit. They get their training in carnival shooting galleries.

There is a difference between shooting pheasants at Preston’s place and shooting doves in Cali, Columbia. No one could afford that much bloodshed at Preston’s. The doves fly over by the thousands and if you forget your shotgun, you can probably kill them with rocks. U.S. sportsmen can fly down for the dove hunts on Braniff Airways which offers special excursion rates which are cheaper per bird than lunching at Preston’s.

“It’s like dying and going to paradise,” a Bloomfield Hills attorney said as he killed doves quicker than he could count them. He was quoted in a sports page story which also said: “All afternoon they had come, a never-ending stream of gray birds. Our shoulders, which we had taken to padding with heavy handkerchiefs the day before, still ached. Earlier they had been actually bleeding from the kick of the gunstock.” There is no bag limit. It is possible for one hunter to kill 600 doves in one day.

Forget about the danger to a species. Maybe Columbia has to be protected from takeover by doves. But what is the pleasure in killing them? Why would anyone spend hundreds of dollars and fly thousands of miles to shoot birds in a birdbath?

If that’s sport, so is eating a hamburger.