I don’t often share my unfiltered opinion. Quite often, I don’t even have one. Call me boring or colorless, but sometimes I simply don’t know enough about a topic to form a clear opinion, and many times I see both sides of the story and can’t decide which to choose. And then, of course, there’s that part of me that just wants to be liked…
And I hesitated about sharing this piece of writing… I wasn’t planning to, but here I am, doing it anyway. And actually, it’s a perfect example of Wildmess, literally and figuratively, so let’s sit down at the table…
Imagine a place somewhere between the woods and the sea where there is enough space for the Wilderness and the Wildflowers, where there is enough room to feel the sun on your skin, let the wind tangle your hair, let the earth, the sun, and the rain embrace and inspire you, and where there is enough space to wander, sometimes stand still, reflect, and wonder…
The Appetizer…
Did you know that only humans can cry out of sadness?
Apparently, there are three types of tears, each with a different composition:
Basal tears keep our eyes healthy and protect the cornea.
Reflex tears are for cleaning and healing when something irritates the eye.
Emotional tears are triggered by feelings of joy, sadness, or other emotions.
In earlier times, this last kind of tear was even used as a test to determine whether you were truly human and not a witch or a werewolf…
The first two types are also found in animals, but the third type hasn’t been proven in them—at least, not yet. Still, we can’t say for certain that they don’t exist…
Well, that tasted good!
The Soup…
In an episode of Zomergasten 2023, a Dutch televion show, with Dutch writer Bibi Dumon Tak, the topic of “hunting” came up. It struck her deeply because, in her backyard—ironically a designated quiet area—geese were being shot from the sky on a weekly basis. She looked into it, it made her angry, she spoke with hunters and even with the police, and eventually she wrote a book about it: In een groen knollenland.
This course already tastes less pleasant… It makes me angry too. What I already suspected—that hunting is pointless—became increasingly clear during the episode. Pointless and ambiguous. Hunters apparently make up their own rules under the label of “wildlife management,” and violations are hardly ever enforced…
The Main Course…
It seems to be mainly a hobby for the elite—likely has been for a very long time—and practiced mostly by white men. Although, apparently, 6% of hunters are women. A clip even showed a female hunter proudly holding the skull of a one-year-old roe deer she had shot, justifying it by saying that the young deer would soon have left its mother anyway. She then went on to describe how she cut unborn piglets out of the belly of a heavily pregnant wild boar she had killed, throwing them away with the slaughter waste…
By now, I’m losing my appetite… Maybe I should be asking whether hunters have feelings at all. In this case, the question posed was whether animals have human emotions—something hunters, of course, deny. But research suggests otherwise. Animals know fear, they feel pain, they build friendships, and they certainly know grief.
The Dessert…
Finally, footage was shown from a wildlife camera in the Veluwe, capturing a dead baby wild boar. It wasn’t killed by a hunter, by the way. The images showed its mother coming by at night, together with one or two siblings. They sniffed the little body, and the mother tried to tuck it under the grass. She even picked tufts of grass to cover her baby with. They circled around it for a while and eventually lay down beside it to sleep.
Now I truly feel sick. This is heartbreaking. And I cry…
And oh, how I wish this mother could cry tears of grief for the loss of her child…
