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The Hanging Venison

While walking into college this morning, I passed a butchers. This is no small feat in itself, given the way such establishments have been steadily falling off the map in the last two decades. Anyway, as I walked by, I happened to glance in, and there, right by the entrance, hanging on the wall by its hind legs, was a beheaded deer.

There was a near imperceptible instant when I was shocked to see it. Do not confuse this with shock at the sight, I was just surprised that someone would display it so blatantly. The next moment, I was wondering to myself what a venison steak would actually taste like. What would the texture be? What would you accompany it with?

The brief moment passed, and I carried on to college, where I am typing this. It has since ocurred to me that it should not be considered audacious for a butcher to display his goods in this fashion. After all, it is only recent history, and our increasingly vigilant efforts to shield both ourselves, and more importantly, our children, from all that is not peachy and bright about the world, that makes such sights a rarity, and even a taboo.

Once upon a time, we would send our sons out with their fathers no sooner than they could walk, bow in hand, and a quiver of arrows at their back, hunting anything they could find in the open forests of the country. We didn;t mind then that children were exposed to death, indeed we encouraged it from an early age. Now we shelter them from everything until the world is thrust upon them, and to my mind, they struggle to cope.

So perhaps we should grab the kids by the scruff of their necks once in a while and give them a look at beheaded deer, or give them the opportunity to kill one of their own. From where I'm sitting, on a bar stool in an internet cafe at college in Reading, it doesn't seem like so bad an idea.

Perhaps parents would feel differently, but the question there is whether their opinion is qualified at all.



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Copyright Insane Bartender 2006-11-09 7:58 a.m.

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