Cleveland Amory is the the P.J. O'Rourke of the animal world. I can't resist quoting one of my favorite passages in a book filled with humor. "Hunters have never seemed to understand what I have tried to do for them. As far back as 1963, for example, on the Today show I announced the formation of a new club -- one to be called the "Hunt the Hunters Hunt Club." All the club ever tried to do was to define the word "conservation" for the hunters the way they have always defined it for the animals. We were shooting them, in other words, for their own good. But from the beginning the hunters made no effort to understand this, even though we made clear we never used words like "shooting" or "killing." Instead we used the hunters' own words -- words with which they would feel comfortable -- "culling," "trimming," "harvesting," or just "taking." We wanted them to understand that if we didn't take them, in no time at all there would be too many of them. They would be crowding the woods and the fields and the roads, and they would be breeding like flies. All we really asked of the hunter, when you came right down to it, was for him to take the long-term view. In the end we both wanted, after all, the same thing -- we both wanted a stronger herd. We even asked them directly if they had ever seen a hunter out there in the middle of the winter, starving in the woods. It was not a pretty sight. The hardest criticism we had to take was that the "Hunt the Hunters Hunt Club" had no season on hunters. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The club's very second rule forbade members to take hunters -- and I quote: "within city limits, in parked cars or in the dating season." And the third rule clearly stated that, after harvesting their hunter, members were not to -- and l quote again -- "drape him over the automobile or mount him when they got home." Mounting the cap or jacket, we felt, was in better taste."
