Sure, it's cold, but I think we need to be tough enough to stomach the sight of deer carcasses, at the very least, in order to properly defend ourselves:
Troubled by the sight of bloody deer carcasses hanging off cars and pickup trucks on North Dakota's highways, state legislator Duane DeKrey proposed a law requiring hunters to throw a tarp over their kills. He might as well have painted a bull's-eye on his back.
The bill caused such an uproar that he withdrew it on Monday, just days later.
``Some of it was even a lot more vitriolic than I ever dreamed it would have been,'' said DeKrey, a Republican representative from a rural district in and around the town of Pettibone. ``It was quite evident which way the bill was going.''
I was actually working on the sports page of a newspaper when management made the decision that we would no longer publish "dead deer" photos. Where I worked, every now and then, a 10-year-old would knock quietly on the door to the newsroom and pop his head in, grinning ear-to-ear. When you felt that blast of fall air, and saw his little, red wind-burnt cheeks, you knew what was coming next. He had a kill to show you. You'd grab the camera, tromp out to the truck behind your little guide, and snap one of him holding the buck's head up by its antlers.
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It ran in the sports section: "Billy Entwistle, 10, killed this buck in Wolf Pit Saturday on a hunting trip with his dad, Danny Entwistle." I was sad when they changed the rule. There was never much blood or gore involved, and the publicity made the kids so happy. After the rule-change, we had to settle for only pictures of barefoot 10-year-olds showing off catfish bigger than their torsos.
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