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The Hunter
Now on DVD
The Hunter
***
There is a television ad campaign by the World Wildlife Fund to protect animals from human poachers.
And I say: good for the WWF. Someone needs to speak for the innocent animals that are being cruelly slaughtered. The baby seals. The fluffy bunnies.
But, wait! The World Wildlife Fund is not protecting those animals at all. The WWF is asking for you to give them your hard earned money in order to protect tigers and polar bears. Tigers and bears? Oh, why?
I can’t think of a charity that is more arrogant and absurd.
It’s arrogant because the WWF and its donors are overprivileged Westerners living in safe suburbs who think they have any right to enforce our values on people half-way around the world.
If Malaysia passed a law that forbade Americans from hunting deer, we would rightly ignore the law. And Fox News would rightly badmouth Malaysians for having the audacity to tell us what to do.
The WWF is absurd because it is effectively telling people that they are not allowed to protect their families.
My parents live in Florida. Florida still has alligators. If an alligator hurt my parents, I would absolutely want revenge.
If I could, I would track down the alligator that did it and kill him. Then I’d pay somebody to make boots out of its skin and I’d wear those boots to go out hunting for its alligator children. And I wouldn’t care at all what the WWF thought about it.
I don’t actually have a clue of how to catch a wild animal. Maybe I could enlist the aid of “The Hunter.”
Willem Dafoe plays Martin David: an American hunter who is sent by a shady businessman to the edge of the civilized world to track down the elusive Tasmanian Tiger.
Unsurprisingly, the macho local Australians do not appreciate the gun-toting intruder and they make it clear that Martin is not wanted.
A normal person would take the hint and get the heck out of there. But because it is a movie and because the character is played by Willem Dafoe, Martin ignores the risks and continues his ill-fated hunt.
“The Hunter” is an intriguing, slow-burning thriller. It is worth watching if only for the many shots of the beautiful, rugged Tasmanian landscape.
The point of this column isn’t that I’m defending Tiger poachers or promoting gator-cide. My point is that when someone is hunting a murderous animal, he may have a good reason. And it’s certainly none of our business what people in faraway lands do to the animals living in their backyards.
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