A Pelican, A Former President, and Many Many Dead Animals

This picture of a pelican landing in a local swimming pool during a kid' swim lesson is on the front page of our local newspaper today. The children seem fascinated by it; the swim instructors are smiling. After it jumped onto the concrete, a fisherman took charge of it. Once it was calmed, the pelican was taken to a nearby pond.

Had Theodore Roosevelt been there, he would most probably have been reaching for his gun. I'm currently reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris' first volume about this former U.S. President (1901-1909). T. Roosevelt was a highly impressive man with an iron sense of self discipline. As a kid, he was scrawny and beset by severe and limiting illnesses. At times, his asthma was so intense that he could sleep only when sitting up. As and adolescent and despite rigorously working out, he was perceived as a weakling and beaten up by other boys. He intensified his already grueling work out sessions. He learned to box. He increasingly raised the bar on himself and eventually became an indomitable force that took on the highest of mountains leaving professional guides behind in his wake.

His mental prowess was equally impressive; his moral sense was unyielding. My reading has taken me through the first three decades of his life. At this point, his political acts have me cheering. He took on what would today be called "the establishment" with courage and a willingness to risk his entire political future. The newspapers of the day raised him up as a hero and tore him down as a hypocrite and worse. His earliest fights involved the patronage system which rewarded political allies with lucrative civil service jobs.

As T. Roosevelt hit upon his thirtieth year, he became a "conservationist." This was a result of his realization that the "big game . . . out West" were starting to disappear. He wanted the hunting opportunities that he had so ardently enjoyed to be available for future generations. It
is his ardent enjoyment of killing animals, even as he wrote about their "death agonies" for which he was responsible. that makes me hate the man. Except the emotions he elicits from me are more complex than that. These could easily be the subject of another post.

Let me be clear about this. I am not currently writing about that kind of sport hunting that results in meat on the table or at the campfire. Nor am I writing about the hunting that "thins" herds that have so increased in size that they threaten their ecosystems. I am writing about the thrill of chasing a bear, even risking one's life to do so, as T. Roosevelt did. I'm writing about the kind of hunting that requires stamina, discipline, a willingness to endure major physical challenges, and skill, attributes that certainly describe T. Roosevelt but not our current Vice President who shoots quail in a well stocked preserve and calls it hunting.

For T. Roosevelt, hunting was a "manly sport." The pelt of the bear that he killed "out West" around his thirtieth year became one of his prized possessions. On his return home, he misplaced the bear's head which he had cut off with the intention of mounting it. I don't remember if he made a meal of bear meat while still on the hunt, but he clearly wasn't hunting for food. For him, the hunt was a challenge and the skin and head were trophies. When he wrote about the experience, he vividly described the raw agony of the bear as it slowly died.

T. Roosevelt was not alone in enjoying such a sport, nor is this kind of enjoyment confined to a not-so-distant past. I found myself thinking about the plight of endangered species this morning and hunts for jungle meat in far off countries. When I see CNN specials about such things, I am utterly and absolutely repelled and helplessly enraged.

This morning, I find myself flipping through the images of the pelican in the pool, of T. Roosevelt aiming his rifle at his thousandth wild animal, of elephants killed for their tusks, and of people whose need for food and land is at the expense of other primates and their habitats. I want to come up with some wise conclusion, maybe along the lines of how our perspectives on such things are inextricably linked to our circumstances. But I'm not up for such reflection right now.
Right now I find the big world with all it's different people and kinds of people confusing and, no matter what, I root for the animals. Right now, I'm all for Theodore Roosevelt rotting in hell no matter what his other accomplishments.