THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED

In which a meat-eating Oliver Roberts traverses the moral and philosophical minefield of a hunting expo

Oliver Roberts asked some hard questions at HuntEx 2016 and had a few guns pointed at him

THE night before attending HuntEx 2016, I eat two lamb burgers for supper. When I eat meat, I normally don’t think, or even care, all that much about where it came from and/or how it ended up here, sandwiched between two halves of the ciabatta heading towards my mouth.

But tonight I do think about it. I think about a lamb, or a field of lambs. I picture them small and white and still unsteady on their feet. I picture their faces and the way they go “baaa” and run to keep up with their mothers. I try to imagine them being trucked off to an abattoir and queued up for slaughter, standing there confused and scared, yes, but probably with no real inkling of what’s about to happen to them, or why.

There are many intricate reasons why I choose to emotionally disconnect myself from the particular meat that I’m eating, and they’re reasons that almost every meat-eater understands. The majority of us believe that we’re kind people and that we treat animals well, so knowledge of any kind of cruel treatment towards them is awful and shocking and upsetting to us. Then there’s the sense of guilt/confusion we feel while being aware that we feel this way and yet still rather casually delight in the consumption of animals of all kinds, animals that have in all probability — no matter how regulated the abattoir — been kept in less than ideal conditions and slaughtered in ways that do not always ensure the quick, painless death we convince ourselves they experience.

So we push away thoughts of the latter as much as possible and continue to tell ourselves that (a) we love animals very much and (b) human beings are meant to eat meat and doesn’t it say somewhere in the Bible that God gave us dominion over animals or something like that?

And please don’t think I’m moralising or making the argument for vegetarianism, because I’m not. I’ve done that thing where you watch a documentary about where our meat really comes from and how they debeak chickens with no anesthetic et cetera and I felt really, really guilty for like a day or two but then gobbled down a hamburger at the first opportunity. I like eating something’s flesh, and I have no intention of stopping, but isn’t it true that any meateater with even the vaguest conscience sets his or her own moral standards in order to indulge in the undeniable deliciousness of a fillet steak or chicken schnitzel or duck à l’orange?

The reason all of this became so pertinent to me the night before attending HuntEx 2016 at Gallagher Estate in Joburg was because, from the start, I was pretty much determined to go there with the mind that hunting is largely abhorrent and that people who kill animals for sport are callous brutes and I’m not like them. If I was a vegan I’d be allowed to think this way. Maybe I’d wear scratchy hemp pants and grow annoying Caucasian dreadlocks and picket and swear and throw fake blood on people at the entrance to the expo. But I won’t because as someone in the process of digesting a lamb that someone else killed for me, I’d be a real asshole to object to hunting.

OK, so it seems there’s a general type that enjoys hunting and it is the type that wears camouflage and drives a f**koff 4X4 fitted with snorkels and

MAYBE I’D WEAR HEMP PANTS AND GROW ANNOYING CAUCASIAN DREADLOCKS