If a cow ever got the chance...

Well, this is really sad.

Evidently they have discovered too many cases of chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin's white-tail deer population (chronic wasting disease is--guess what--the deer form of Mad Cow disease!) and they don't know how to control its spread... SO, from now until next January, it's open season. The DNR wants hunters to kill about 15,000 deer.

I'm not as negative towards deer hunting as you might think. My dad and his brothers have been hunting for as long as I can remember. When I was a small child, we ate way more venison than beef. Sitting in a tree stand, freezing, before dawn in the middle of November waiting for something to move so you can kill it does not sound like my idea of fun, but it's one of those things my family does, and bitching about it will get me nowhere. They never killed more deer than we could eat. Plus, honestly, if you're going to be slaughtering large animals and then eating their carcasses, better that it be an animal who spent its whole life frolicking in the woods and annoying motorists than one who never saw the outside of a high-density feedlot and is cut up before it's even dead. ("That's the kill floor, Jimmy! Don't be alarmed by the name, it's really a steel grating...")

Still, this. It bothers me that all these deer are just going to be shot and not eaten. (I don't care if this chronic wasting disease hasn't crossed the species barrier yet, I don't want the family eating it, and probably a lot of other people feel the same.) Plus, it's hard enough for deer to endure the standard nine-day rifle season; imagine living through nine months of being shot at every time you crossed an open field.

Well, I guess the point is you don't live through it.

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