Scott Rall’s column about the lost art of trapping in The Worthington Daily Globe is the latest in a never-ending homage to people who make a living killing things for money – well, not for money because, of course, according to the article “No one does it for the money anymore“. Mr. Rall goes on to nobly blur the boundaries between the concept of being connected to the natural world and being in the service of folks who are inconvenienced by it. Nice.
“Randy checks his traps each and every day. This is a huge commitment. You never get a day off and there are very few people you can call on to cover the trap line for you…Nobody that traps is in it for the money. A good week of trapping will cover the cost of fuel to run the trap lines that week….Trapping to Randy is truly a calling — much like restoring habitat is a calling to me. You do it for the history and nostalgia and to keep tradition and an American way of life alive. After a few hours I got the feeling that trapping is a connection to the land that can only be achieved by participating in the predator-prey relationship.”
The mind reels. The jaw drops. The fingers type. Where to begin?
Shall I begin with the comment that folks nowadays don’t have enough commitment to do something every day anymore? (Ahem.) With the notion that trapping connects you to history and nostalgia? (Killing Indians and keeping slaves was an American way of life once. Should we consider it noble now to keep that tradition?) The disservice to the term “calling” by using it in this way? (Mother Theresa had a calling. Martin Luther King had a calling. John Muir had a “calling”.)Randy has about as much of a calling as Dexter, the Artful Dodger, or Thenardier.
But I think the clearly onanistically derived fantasy about participating in the “predator-prey relationship” is as rich as anything you are likely to read in this lifetime. I don’t know if Mr. Rall longs to be on Randy’s dinner menu or if he has just been immersed too deeply in his daughter’s copy of The Hunger Games but there is no excuse for a grown man getting paid for that level of hyperbole.
Rather than be outraged at the language, the cruelty or the glorification of this excuse for laziness, or even without commenting on the ironic failure to realize that the best way to protect habitat might be not to kill the animal that creates it, I will just say that Mr. Rall is unoriginal. Five columnists in the past three months have written a better articles praising trapping then you. This is old news. Here’s a description of one of my favorites.
Most bitterly ironic sentence from the entire article deifying beaver killing?
“With so little water left around the area due to drought, the prime spots for setting traps are dramatically reduced. I would guess 90 percent of what is normally wet is now bone dry.”
