Those Deer Pictures

Pictures of dead deer cause every newspaper that I am familiar with a bit of grief. In my case, I basically oppose hunting. This statement no doubt will be misinterpreted. But I see hunting as a barbaric activity in which Bambi has scant chance of surviving.

I am not against firearms. I have a background as an expert Army rifleman who barely escaped being assigned to Army sniper school in Alaska during the Vietnam War. I come from a family of hunters, including bear hunters, in North Carolina.

But it crushes me to see these dead deer all over the place. This business of "thinning the herd" does not persuade me to the contrary opinion.

Hunters bring the deer to us to photograph or they bring photos of their kills. We dutifully publish them.

I remember vividly the time when I was editor of the Staunton newspaper and a female reporter went to photograph the kill of the day. To her horror, she discovered the deer was not dead. She took the photo anyway. I cannot imagine what the hunter did, but I suspect he ended up shooting the deer again after the photo was taken.

Another problem we have is that those in these pictures expect them to be published pronto. We publish them on a space available basis and may eventually have to impose a charge. That is what we did in Staunton. We put on the deer photos into a special section and called it our "dead deer tab." We charged hunters for the photos, and, of course, they paid for the privilege of being included.

Recently, we had a person get irate because we had not published one of these pictures fast enough. This person is not even a subscriber and I do not feel obligated to hurry about getting the photo into the paper, but it will get there.