By Sebastian Morello, European Conservative.
(Photo: Matthieu Rochette/Unsplash)
Fake emotion has invaded family life, education, business, law, and, perhaps above all, politics, the very ordering of the nation and securing of its future flourishing.
ecently, I was having dinner with a friend during his visit to London from his home on the Isle of Skye. During our meal at his splendid Pall Mall club, I expressed my interest in visiting Skye to stalk red deer, at which point he exclaimed, “Oh please do; the deer herds greatly need reducing!”
The number of red deer in the Scottish Highlands and on the islands has doubled in the last fifty years, and with each passing year, the number of deer being culled drops. Sometimes herds of over a thousand deer are spotted moving over the hillsides, stripping the landscape of its already thin and depleted foliage as they travel.
“Doesn’t recreational stalking deal with this problem to some degree?” I asked. To my amazement, my companion informed me that such stalking is very much out of fashion now in Scotland, and is a pastime pursued by an ever-diminishing number of people. “Why is the venerable and celebrated tradition of highland stalking dying out?” I further inquired. My friend replied with one word: “Bambi.”
In Scotland, like so many other places, recreational hunting as a key part of wildlife management is under threat, the chief reason being the misguided sentimentalism of a generation increasingly severed from the realities of the natural world. The question we should ask ourselves is: if Bambi doesn’t take a bullet to the chest or neck, how does he die? This, it seems, is a question never raised for consideration by those who condemn hunting as barbaric.