Suburban Redneck

Our neighbors are rather quiet and unassuming. You see them and their kids all over the neighborhood, sometimes even sleeping underneath the trees in the back of the house. Here’s one of them inspecting our car.

In Texas, we would have suspected that she would dress out to only about 40lbs. of meat, and thus wasn’t really worth shooting unless she were a bit older. Plus, the season doesn’t start in Texas until November (though it’s already started out here in California). In addition, dropping a doe that close to a car just isn’t sporting. To add to that, evidently the police in California object to the use of firearms in a residential area.

So, we’ve learned to enjoy their company, and they’ve (mostly) learned to stay out of the way of moving vehicles. A moving vehicle will typically get the better of a deer; it’s less certain when it’s not moving. In Texas, a vehicle is considered a substandard way of harvesting a buck or a doe; normally, one would use a .30-06 or a .270 (though some people think that’s a “lady’s rifle”). Roadkill also doesn’t taste as good as something that’s been properly dressed and butchered.

There’s a prevailing opinion among many people in California that hunters are vacuous, beer-swilling idiots who like nothing more than killing poor, innocent little Bambi’s. In my personal experience, however, the hunters I’ve known have been much more environmentally aware than the average Joe on the street. Hunters are intimately familiar with nature; they watch the seasons, and they participate in it; in this case, they fill the ecological role of predator, since humans have generally eliminated the natural predators that used to exist to control the deer population (think about it: would you like have mountain lions and bobcats patrolling your neighborhood?). The fact is, deer reproduce like rabbits; without some form of population control, be it hunters or mountain lions, they will eat every living plant in their territory and then starve to death.

People that have grown up in urban areas like to think of “nature” as something beautiful and serene that’s “out there,” that they can go a visit for a weekend, and they really don’t like to hear the harsh truth that “just letting them alone” is not necessarily the best thing for them. Try as they might, the eco-warriors have not been able to teach birth control methods to deer, nor have they been able to civilize the larger and more dangerous animals.

So think of that the next time you see my neighbors sleeping on your lawn.