My Battle with Disney

I will admit it. The nostalgia got to us and we threw our money at Disney+. Hubs and I were excited to show our kids the cartoons and movies that we grew up with. It never dawned on me that I would be faced with defending my love of hunting and trapping to those kids as we watched the movies.

The Fox and the Hound

Are those the traps you use?

Why would Copper hunt Tod if that’s his friend?

Amos Slade is the antagonist. An “evil” trapper who wants to hurt poor, cute Tod the fox. He raises hounds, sets jaw-toothed traps (the illegal kind) and continues to threaten the Widow Tweed about Tod getting into his chickens and needing to return to the wild. The story is more about the conflict around the friendship between the dog and fox but the underlying issue is about hunting and trapping.

Beauty and the Beast

Another antagonist, Gaston is described as an "arrogant hunter" who sings about how no one can shoot like him and that he uses antlers in his decorating (who can blame him?!). If you are a kid watching this, you probably wont pick up on all of the antlers and heads mounted on the wall of the tavern or that he walks around with a quiver full of arrows but for someone who does some of those things, it's easy to spot and see how Disney is equating those activities with someone who is the bad guy.

Bambi - this one is the worst!

Where did is mom go?

Why would they let their campfire get out of control?

Why are there so many dogs chasing Filene? Is that what happens when you go bear hunting?

I have not watched this movie for a LONG time but I knew his mom dies and I was prepared for it. Disney likes the dramatic narrative and mom's are an easy target... we saw Coral get eaten by a barracuda in the first five minutes of Finding Nemo. The idea of killing a deer so that we can eat it, is not foreign to my kids and I wanted them to be prepared for it when it happened in the movie. But before we got to that point, there was the campfire that spread throughout the forest caused by hunters that left to go hunt birds and rabbits (you watch the animals get shot in the movie!) His mom dies and then Filene (Bambi’s love interest) gets chased by a pack of dogs, presumably out hunting deer. It was mortifying. The movie was released in 1942, when hunting was more of a common thing but the entire movie is just one example after another of how bad hunters are. I was happy that the kids were bored with the movie and had no desire to watch it again.

Anthropomorphizing cute cuddly animals may sell tickets to the movies but when we see people going into the woods and Nation Parks thinking that those bears, foxes, moose, buffalo etc. are friendly, the reality can have devastating consequences.

So, for every anti-hunting and anti-trapping movie we watch, I will make my kids watch an episode of Drury Outdoors, MeatEater and Jim Shockey’s Hunting Adventures.

Eagles on the trail

Reason number 3,657,935 why my Dad is the best: As we were snowmobiling, we approached a bog and three eagles with about 20 crows took off. It could only mean one thing in my book - something was dead. We circled back and walked around in the snow but the birds had left and we couldnt find anything that would resemble a meal. A part of me thinks that we were in the wrong piece of land and should have been on the other side of the bog but in our snowmobile gear, we were not going to cover a lot of ground. I was disappointed that we couldn't find what the birds were eating but I was able to get some good pictures of one of the mature eagles and the immature eagle that were flying around.

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it.…

Wanted: Mr. Sportsman

A friend of mine sent me this link and asked what I thought about it. I had seen it before and was honest when I told him how degrading I felt it was. Not only was the title of the "Miss Maine Sportsman" application in pink* but the questions were incredibly insulting to those of us that are fighting to be taken seriously among our male counterparts.

Questions like, "Do you clean your own kills/catches?" would never be asked if it were Mr. Maine Sportsman. It would be assumed that yes, of course men clean what they kill. Why is that assumption not made of us outdoor women? Another question, "Do cook [sic] what you catch/kill? If so, what’s your favorite recipe?" would never be asked of men.

My friend asked me what sort of questions I would ask if it were a Mr. Maine Sportsman pageant. I came up with a bunch of snarky questions (Do you bait your own hook?) but then I thought about the questions that could have the most impact on the men that would…

and a strong cup of coffee

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