[lit-ideas] The right to arm bears?
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 08:59:53 -0700 (PDT)
For Eric, from Helsingin Sanomat International
Edition:
The right to arm bears?
A moral tale of self-defence and bitten buttocks
By Jouni K. Kemppainen
Now you can more or less understand that in the
case of the conflicts in the Middle East many people
get a trifle confused about who the aggressor is, and
who is the victim.
Someone attacks somebody, but that somebody has
first shot a somebody, but then again this person who
has been shot has previously mistreated the other
somebody, who has on an earlier occasion given a
whupping to someone, and so on and so on.
So much for the Middle East, but in the case that
somebody shoots somebody with a rifle, and the one
that has been shot manages to escape and then defends
himself or herself against his or her persecutors by
biting one of them in the buttocks, you would sort of
imagine that there isn't that much in the way of
ambiguity or room for confusion: the one with the
rifle is the aggressor, and the bum-biter is the
victim.
Wrong, apparently.
Last Monday, the late-edition tabloid Iltalehti ran
the headline "Bear bites hunter", and the similar
journal Ilta-Sanomat declared that "Dog escapes from
bear".
When one actually troubled to read these
articles, it became clear that on the preceding Sunday
morning a group of hunters had shot a bear, wounding
it. The bear fled. The hunting-party set off after the
wounded female bear, and in the afternoon the escapee
managed to bite one of the party in his fleshy nether
regions.
Later the bear was despatched for good.
On Tuesday Ilta-Sanomat interviewed the hunter who had
had the bear's jaws on his rump, and by Wednesday the
deceased bruin had already been given a new monicker
in the headline: "Attack-bear".
The piece reported that the two cubs belonging
to the shot bear had also received a death sentence.
We were thus informed that the bum-biting animal
was in fact a mother bear, who was in the woods with
her cubs, born this year.
However, the article did not see fit to mention
that shooting such a bear is against the law.
But self-defence is not against the law. And
fortunately in this instance, as in nearly all cases,
the bear that attacked a human chose as its victim
specifically an armed human.
And not one of those untold numbers of innocent
unarmed people wandering in the woods.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.8.2006
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/The+right+to+arm+bears/1135221277463
Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland
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