Thursday, March 11, 2010

local practices

on my daily walk, i pass two sites that often contain a gruesome reminder that this area is the second to the last frontier (alaska being the last). both are "ditches", where natural drainages run under the road. for some reason, perhaps the same one that drove the former owners of my farm to have their dump on the stream on my land, people dump illegal deer carcasses in these sites. there is always an emptied plastic bag nearby.



there's nothing i can do about this. i will make art about it. i will, perhaps, collect a  bone to make some bone folders. or i will take these photos and use them in art. i have done so with photos i've taken of a coyote hunter's winter kill, boasting and hanging outside his home, or a road killed critter. it's not the death or even the hunting that disturbs me, it's the illegal killing. and last week i saw my neighbor dragging a deer carcass into his field. the edible bits were removed. it is not deer season.


for me, to live in this place i must be amicable. but i can make art that says: this is happening. this is how it is here. sometimes. perhaps a young hunter will see this and be reminded of their obligations to the animals they hunt.

8 comments:

  1. Many North Country hunters come from traditions that are older than the law and therefore they feel that the law does not apply to them. And some families honestly need the meat. Not all, but some.

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  2. i hope that any animal killed out of season is used and needed for sustinance. it's the law breaking to get away with it i hate. my farm has been poached for 23 years, by people following those old traditions.

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  3. i find that frontier kind of living disturbing.
    it's as if there was card blanche and anything went.no govt, no laws, no social concern, just the survival of the fittest.

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  4. not true of all cultures...i think there can be peace on the frontier. depends.

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  5. absolutely. most people are respectful hunters. it's the outlaws that dump carcasses empty of the meat (only) in streams that i take issue with. i love finding skeletons, i just hate this practice. in north america frontier sometimes equals exploitation.

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  6. We're not on the frontier, we're in cosy North Norfolk, UK, and the other day a friend of mine found the entrails of two deer dumped by the side of the path. The carcasses had been taken. Looks like there are hunters everywhere.

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  7. wow. i can appreciate this post. i see this kind of cast off carnage on my walks too (mountains of colorado- rural)i have thought about making art of it too but didn't have the guts. (no pun intended!) at first i thought maybe a mountian lion had drug the elk down the slope to feed. but then i started to notice the tell tale plastic bags, old rugs, a dryer...further down tangled in the otherwise pristine scrub oak forest. even if they had a license...its just so irreverant.
    lovely blog you have here. found you via cathy cullis. :)

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