Rhetoric: The Living, Breathing “Resource”

Words shape how we as enthusiasts perceive our outdoor environs. Here, Drake contributing editor, Bruce Smithhammer, pits the lexicons of wildlife bureaucracy against visceral experience in a personal quest for true meaning.

From the Adventure Journal: “As a hunter and angler, deeply involved in this wet, dirty and sometimes bloody process, I have to draw a line and distance myself from this linguistic trend. This terminology can stay where it should – in offices and negotiation rooms and urban environs. Words reflect how we perceive things, and I can’t let the sterility of agency-speak infiltrate my own word choices. I can’t consider the process of hunting and killing an animal as “resource collection,” and I’m at a loss for what to say to anyone who has come to view this sacred, ancient act as anything so sterile. I won’t distance myself from what this really is. It is hunting, and a part of hunting, at least sometimes, is taking a life. While this is far from the sole reason I am out here, neither is it a thing I take casually. Nor am I willing to trivialize or sanitize this act out of consideration for those who have become so removed from the fundamentals of natural processes, and the manner in which food arrives on their plates, that they can’t deal with it. That is their burden to philosophically dance around, not mine.”

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