Itchy Trigger Finger

The Associated Press has reported that over 6,000 people have applied for 24 hunting licenses to hunt bison in Montana for the first time in 15 years.

Now, I don't know many hunters, nor do I hunt anything worse than a frozen White Castle hamburger, but I do read a lot and watch a lot of television, and I've never come across an interview with a hunter who was eager to kill a bison. Hell, it's never even come up, as far as I know.

Not even Ted Nugent or Moses Himself, Charlton Heston, has said, "Damn those bison! Why can't we just kill them? If they ever let us do it, I'll be first in line!"

But Tom Palmer, spokesman for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, thinks differently.

"It's a real hunt," he said. "I think hunters recognize that and are interested in participating."

So all those other hunts that hunters "participate" in are fake. They don't really kill deer or rabbits or geese. That's just acting, like the old cartoons where the animals punch into the timeclock on the side of the tree and nothing really happens until finally the whistle blows and everyone goes home.

What the hunters really recognize is that they have just been allowed to kill something other than what they are used to killing. If Montana set up a lottery where ten people could hunt a few humans, a la Most Dangerous Game and Hard Target, 6,000 would enter in the first minute, and the total would probably be in the hundreds of thousands.

I just hope that when that scenario does actually come to pass, I get to choose who gets hunted.