The following opinion piece was written in response to a letter to the Editor entitled "Gun Culture", published in the Bega District News on August 29, 2014.
Hunting part of everyday life on the land
By Garry Mallard
The Bega District News et alii
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014
Once again Susan Cruttenden, as spokesperson for her Greens-nurtured political lobby group ‘S.A.F.E.’, has seen fit to openly pronounce the contempt with which she and her colleagues view their community.
In a nutshell, Ms Cruttended claims that exposure to the killing of animals, such as may be witnessed on a family hunting trip, desensitises young minds to violence, potentially turning them to a life of mayhem.
To justify her claims Ms Cruttenden quotes, or should I say she cherry-picks, a study that dealt with violent imagery on television, in the movies and in video games. The study ostensibly concluded that prolonged exposure may cause developmental delays in those areas of the brain responsible for limiting violent behaviour and impulse control.
Ms Cruttenden says that if the study has proven that viewing such material inhibits the growth of the brain’s frontal lobes, how much more damage must fragile young minds sustain as a result of helping daddy kill a deer or a wild dog.
Ms Cruttenden, the men and women who, for generations, have worked the land and tirelessly built the community you live in, routinely kill animals. It is part of the everyday business of working the land. They slaughter animals for meat; they shoot them for mercy or for management purposes.
They gas rabbits and rip their burrows, shoot and poison foxes, pigs and dogs, and all of this they do with their children – boys and girls – at heel, learning the business of life on the land.
For the record, Ms Cruttenden, exactly how deranged do you believe these children of rural animal killers have grown up to be?
How many of yesterday’s rural youth are crazed killers roaming the streets of Narooma/Dalmeny darkly plotting drive-by shootings and school massacres? Surely if the occasional deer hunt can cause brain damage as you claim, the youth of farming communities, having suffered daily exposure for years on end, must be completely psychotic and know absolutely no restraint whatsoever?
To the contrary, those children have matured into the responsible adults you rely upon every day – the ambulance officers, doctors and nurses, RFS, SES and VRA volunteers who daily put their lives on the line for the likes of people who routinely insult them in the press. They have grown up to be teachers, mechanics, shop assistants, chefs, police officers, farmers, vets, and all the other folk who make rural communities sustainable.
Moreover, all the antisocial outcomes of “desensitisation to killing animals” you and your pals feign concern about, occur not in rural areas such as ours, but in cities where few children are exposed to the killing of any animal, other than the family dog in the oh-so sanitized setting of an urban veterinary practice, complete with soft lighting and piped music. The armed robberies, the muggings, the rapes, the murders, the drive-by shootings, the massacres all happen in places where children are insulated from the everyday realities of rural life.
Would you be happier there perhaps?
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