Geezush, I'm lossin' it.

I can't believe I defended Mike Huckabee in response to an op-ed posted at BuzzFlash.com by one Martha Rosenberg. I wrote:

Regardless of what you think about hunting and hunters, whenever I read an ill-informed, ignorant anti-hunting screed, such as this, I am reminded of an illfated experiment carried out in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the 1950s or 60s.

What I remember is reading an article in Natural History Magazine or perhaps in what was then The Iowa Conservationist magazine years ago, before the Internet, of the State of New Jersey's effort to increase the deer population after World War II. The article said that the New Jersey fish and game department fenced off a sizable portion of the Pine Barrens and left it untouched for ten years.

When agents and scientists of the New Jersey fish and game department returned to the fenced-off area of the Barrens they found anything but a healthy eco-system. They did find diseased and malnourished deer and depleted vegetation due to overgrazing. Once the fence was torn down, predators, including human hunters, were reintroduced, the deer population rebounded.

So, Martha, let me ask you this: Is it more humane to let wildlife, where human interference has disrupted the balance between predator and prey, overpopulate and overgraze an area and ultimately die of stavation and disease or allow hunting to cull the herd under the various state departments of natural resources supervision? Would you rather see more deer and other prey animals slaughtered along our Interstate highways, as they are now anyway, or dispatched by an arrow, shotgun slug or bullet?

Fine you don't like hunting, Martha, but Mike Huckabee doesn't seem to be a slob hunter. If you want to lambaste him on his sleazy use of religion to pander to right wing Christians be my guest, it's unconstitutional anyway. But essays like this drove many good Democrats into the Republican Party in the 1980s and the poor jamokes have been voting against their own best economic self interests ever since.

p.s. I had a great-uncle who was a Disciples of Christ minister and he hunted, and the the Methodist minister of the church I went to when I was a kid. His kids were kicked out of high school for wearing black armbands to protest US involvement in Vietnam. Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court, I believe.

Now that I re-read it it's not much of a defense. But, Christ, these vegan, nature lovers are such ignoramuses it's not even funny. And all these dopes do is make assholes like Ted Nugent look good. Stupid fuckers all of 'em.