Many of my friends these days are packing. They’ve got permits and they’re armed and ready. Several of them are going to the Pheasant Sanctuary with shotguns. It’s the story of my life but I can’t help but think of myself as the pheasant in this tale.
I want to meet the brilliant guy who first decided to call Pheasantville, a Sanctuary. I bet if you asked every single pheasant there, not a single one would have picked that word. Sanctuary, my ass. A refuge? A holy place? And get this, “a place where wildlife is protected.”
My friends are kind and considerate people. They really don’t want to cause the pheasants too much pain. The kind and considerate thing to do, they insist, is to blow their heads off. By using shotgun shells with hundreds of little ball-bearing-like pellets you can aim in the general direction of the bird and somehow some of these pellets will do the trick.
Unfortunately, I have been birdsitting and lately I wake up to the sounds of tweets – real tweets and chirps, not Twitter tweets. Coming from two cockatiels, Eli and Calypso, and a Quaker parrot named Vladimir.
After you’ve had three birds sitting on your arms and shoulders, or watching football with you, you have a whole new perspective on the issue of blowing off the heads of birds. Now I love roast beef and pork ribs and pastrami, so I already know I’m a hypocrite. But it just takes having Vladimir say “goodmorning” at six-thirty on your way to shave to reevaluate the way these things are done.
It just seems a bit unfair. You pay a bunch of money. You bring your shotgun and your shells and you shoot fifteen birds. None of whom is allowed to shoot back. But what if just once they did. I wrote a folk song, “He Was A Pheasant Friend Of Mine:”
This is the story of my pheasant friend,
To the pheasant hunt, he wouldn’t bend.
He found himself a pheasant gun
And shot some hunters one by one.
From what I’m told, you can take your dead pheasants home with you, or they’ll dress them for you. Obviously, the same guy who came up with the name “Sanctuary” decided on the name “dress.” Like that’s got to be the pheasant’s worst nightmare: wandering around someone’s kitchen stark naked. Never mind the fact that you no longer have a head.
Now I really don’t want to spoil your next pheasant dinner. I don’t particular enjoy it when I’m about to have scrambled eggs and chives when I’m told about how eight thousand chickens live in a two by four feet studio apartment in some small town like Hope, Arkansas.
It’s just that these darn cockatiels and Vladimir are making me soft. I know the right thing to do is man-up and get my permit.
But there’s one more really big problem I have to confront. I really don’t like the idea of going out into the Sanctuary with a bunch of guys who might be thinking about a client who’s been driving them nuts, or about the fight they just had with their girlfriend or wife about the best place to put the peanut butter, or about whether they’d rather be Brad Pitt or Tiger Woods. Usually, this is all really interesting stuff. But when you add shotguns, it seems to me a bit dicey. All I see is a bunch of freaked out birds flying hysterically this way and that, and a bunch of raised shotguns pointing every which way and a bunch of guys each wanting to get to the holy grail of fifteen pheasants. It just doesn’t seem like the perfect place for a paranoid folksinger who just might have an international folk hit in hand.
Altogether now:
This is the story of my pheasant friend,
To the pheasant hunt, he wouldn’t bend.
He found himself a pheasant gun
And shot some hunters one by one.
The widows cried, and my friend just fried
But this pheasant story has never died.
‘Cause he found a pheasant gun
And shot some hunters one by one.
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The author wishes to assure his readers that he worked closely with the National Shotgun Association to ensure that not a single hunter was really hurt in the writing of this story. And that he might be packing, and will act forcefully to protect his copyright to “He Was A Pheasant Friend Of Mine.”
Thursday, December 31, 2009 © Mickey Friedman – All Rights Reserved