Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 1.10.
In this space I often mention the complaints Countryside Post gets, and I apologize for them. This week, I'm offering no apologies for something we ran. Young David Martin shot his first deer recently and proudly submitted a picture of it to the Post, and we ran it on page 5 last week.
Since then we've received five phone calls from people who, for various reasons, do not wish to see dead animals in their paper. I can understand where they're coming from; deer are cute and friendly and it's not nice to see one of God's creatures butchered like that. On the other hand, we've been running pictures of dismembered animals in our supermarket ads… but then again, deer have better publicity. Disney never made a cartoon about a baby cow.
News sometimes isn't pretty. Sometimes it's horrible. Take that horse some psychos set on fire the day before Halloween. We almost ran a photo of it. Why? Because it was news. Insane behavior, when it affects other people, is news. I prefer good news, but sometimes the public has to know bad stuff whether they like it or not.
I'm not saying that deer hunting is bad. I don't hunt, but I believe it's necessary to keep the deer population low, before they start eating crops and getting hit by cars more regularly. To many, hunting is quite important, and word of anyone's first kill is equally important. In other words, news. And if you think the sight of a dead deer was icky, you've just encountered what was, to you, bad news. But it's still news, and the Post does news.
Don't like it? Write a letter. We'll print it. But please, don't call to tell me you think hunting photos are inappropriate. Hunters, like you, are welcome to contribute to their paper. Consider this fair warning: you may see hunting pictures in the Post. But you won't see any butchering. We leave that for the supermarkets.
—Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 9/14/2009: Though the previous week’s issue was short on space, I did find some room to include a picture submitted by the Martin family of their son David’s first kill. It was strung up by its hind legs, and and David posed with his rifle in front of it. He was quite proud. I figured, “Good for him,” and ran it on page 5.
The paper was printed, distributed… and then the calls came in. “That was horrible,” one person complained. “How can you show something like that?”
It wasn’t a huge show of force from the anti-hunting folks—what few there were—but it was enough to make Jill extremely nervous. She doesn’t handle criticism well. She was convinced, thanks to her tendency to extrapolate a few people into “everybody,” that we’d managed to annoy “everybody” in the county, and now “everybody” hated the paper.
We only had five disapproving phone calls. But the a letter came in—a scathing one, written by a Yvonne Wright, who didn’t leave a name or phone number. She tore the Post up one side and down the other, and me right along with it.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have printed a letter that didn’t have any contact information on it. But, God help me, I love nut mail. There’s something masochistically entertaining about someone who irrationally hates your guts. You know those kids who act out because bad attention is better than no attention? It’s sorta like that. I have to fight my tendency to provoke them into greater and greater paroxysms of fury. There’s just something evil in me that wants to make them so angry that they stroke out. So I ran anyway, it in this very issue, issue 1.10.
Jill tried to talk me out of it. “It makes us look horrible,” she complained.
“No,” I said, “it makes her look insane. People that read the Post know we’re not like this, and people who haven’t read the Post before will figure we’re gutsy for running this letter. Don’t worry. At least one person will write a rebuttal, and that’ll be that.”