I often tease my little brother about his rapidly growing trophy collection. “If you keep going,” I warn him, “you’ll need to build a new house just to keep your trophies!”
Well, maybe that’s not such a far-fetched idea! Reading through the news feeds, I stumbled over the story of Jim Hall, a hunter from Troy, NY. Hall, it seems, won a big, fat lottery prize ($65million) and found that it funded a good bit of international hunting opportunities. As his trophy collection grew, Hall realized he’d need a bigger place to store them. Check out the whole story, and some pics of his collection at the Star Gazette website.
I know we see a fair number of pretty serious trophy hunters out at the Native Hunt ranches. Hopefully their collection will soon sport a fine eurasian boar, or a big-beamed fallow buck!
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You know Phillip,
This always seems to be a hot button topic when the antis want to disparage us hunters, and sadly a large number of hunters get lured into a debate about it.
And even more sadly, some of those hunters seem to believe that we should try and placate the antis with statements like:Oh, I am just a meat hunter or Those trophy hunters give us such a bad rap!
We all know that no matter what you say or how much you give in to the antis, they will always read their philosophy’s into what we say with their own agenda at the forefront. And without any consideration to any of our statements, no matter what the actuality of our stance truly is.
The fact of the matter is that we “do” consume the meat from our kills, and we do keep “Trophy’s” of the animals which we hunt and harvest.
This could be in the form of a picture, or the hide, a piece of bone or hoof, skull, antlers or Mounted Trophies, and that is just a fact about us humans, and how our psyche has developed over the past several millennia concerning the hunt and our spiritual connection with the animals which we hunt.
I know that I personally want to have mementos of the animals which I have hunted and killed, for no more reason than the fact that I realize that there will come a day when I will not physically be able to take to the field.
When that happens I will have my Trophy Room to retire to and simply sit, sip upon a glass of some fine scotch and “Reminisce”
Totally with you there, Michael.
The HSUS and PETA have both leveraged the hell out of the term “trophy hunter”, and the fact that the vast majority of Americans are pretty ignorant about hunting. As a result, they’ve built that negative (and fallacious) stereotype of the “trophy hunter” as the guy who kills only for the head and leaves the rest to rot. Not only is this kind of person an aberration in the hunting community, it’s also illegal in most states to leave the meat of a game animal in the field.
For the vast majority of us, every memory of every hunt is a trophy… whether that memory is preserved in our minds, or on the wall.