Hunting Humans

I think Kim du Toit has been reading The Corner lately:

[A]n increasingly large cohort of America in the lower 48 (and probably Hawaii) are p—-ies. They have no clue where their food comes from, they don’t hunt, they don’t fish, so they get to act all high and mighty about scenes like [the Sarah Palin “Faces of Turkey Death” video].

In Alaska, they have critters that consider humans food. Absent high powered rifles, humans are not at the apex of the food chain in Alaska. That will tend to give people a different perspective than the silk pantywaists in the lower 48.

I wish people would stop with this sort of nonsense, but surely they won’t. For the record, there are no “critters in Alaska that consider humans food” unless — like the unmourned Timothy Treadwell — you defy every sensible piece of advice and hang around famished grizzly elders who would (and did) kill you after all the dead salmon had been harvested. It’s true that polar bears would gobble a human or two — but here again, only under conditions of extreme ecological duress, such as the disappearance of summer ice in the Arctic (which, I remind everyone, our governor doesn’t seem to think is a problem.) Even this, though, would place maybe 1% of Alaskans at risk of being gnawed on by a starving, rogue bear who would much rather eat your dog or your garbage than you.

But here’s the bottom line: so far as animals are concerned, humans are not terribly appealing as a source of food. I suppose there’s a species of conservative who derives an extra surge of adrenaline from the claim that people aren’t at the top of a regional food chain, but these are apparently the same people who equate hunting and fishing with stuffing a turkey into a killing funnel…

(via Ahab)