Warning. Death below.

I don't hunt, but I make my property available to those who do, if they meet certain criteria. Lately it has become harder and harder to find good people who have the actual need, and the time to hunt. If they need to hunt for food, they don't have the luxury of taking the time off from work. So needless to say, no deer have been taken on our property since we moved here five years ago.

In our area, there are genuinely people who do count on venison to feed their families. Around here, if you hit a deer with your car, someone is likely to stop, ask if you are OK, then ask if they can have the deer. In that case, it's not about sport. It's about filling the freezer for your family.

This morning Mark mentioned someone had thrown a deer carcass in our creek, just above our property line. My brother-in-law and I went down to get it out of there before the rain might wash her downstream into the residential area.

She had been shot (illegally, I assume, otherwise why remove her carcass from where she had been shot?), her hindquarters removed for the meat, and then purposely thrown into this pool about five feet off the road. The whiteness you see is the inside of her hide where they skinned her back and haunches and left the flap attached. She didn't wash there from upstream, because you can see the leg on the shore where the hunter left it. It's bad enough that they took a deer illegally from some other property and tossed it on someone else's. But why contaminate the stream? Just to hear a big splash?

We pulled the deer up on shore where the foxes and other scavengers and decomposers could get to her. So it appears even "meat hunters" (who I previously had a naive stereotyped general respect for) can be just as slobbish as some trophy hunters.

I guess any human, anywhere, can be disrespectful of life, of law, of nature, or of neighbors, whether they spend their lives looking for trophies or just dinner for the table. In the woods or in the board room.