Don’t get me wrong. I love Cabela’s, the giant American outfitting company that has now opened stores in Canada.
I may be an aging, peace-loving, war-resisting, left-leaning liberal, but when confronted by page after page (or better yet, aisle after aisle) of guns, knives, camo gear, tents, hiking boots, fishing rods, bows and arrows, I mean, really, how can a guy resist?
But I must say that the company is testing my love with the latest catalogue. They are, I think, toying dangerously with the very gut-level motivations that make me feel manly.
The he-man self-image of hunter/provider that the company is based on, and which we poor males cling to, is being threatened by the technology that is worming its way into the company’s very soul.
Where once the struggle for animal supremacy and dominion over all living creatures meant going nearly naked into the wilderness to hunt and fish for survival, now the 21st century hunter drives his 100-horsepower ATV a few clicks into the bush, unloads his treetop shooting tower, sets up his automatic feeding station, activates his electronic deer/elk/moose caller and, swathed head to toe in custom, camouflage, no-odor Goretex, sits above the trail until a poor, unsuspecting ungulate trots below him to dine.
Whereupon the waiting “sportsman” blasts the creature into oblivion with his red-dot scoped, semi-automatic .308 Magnum.
But I can hear you say, “Man has always used technology to outwit and out manoeuvre his prey.”
True, of course, but I don’t think Mother Nature blessed the male of the species with testosterone in anticipation of the challenges we must face when we are forced to manipulate the pesky buttons on our GPS or fumble with the controller knobs on our electric underwear.
My long-dead Manitoba grandfather would chime in here. “Aye, but hunters were always a little soft. Ice fishing,” he would say, “now there’s a sport that will always be for the hardy and the hearty!”
It’s a good thing he will never see the Cabela’s Christmas catalogue: $400 pop-up ice fishing tents, $300 motorized ice augers, $600 sonar detectors to find the fish through the ice and $500 TV monitors with tiny submersible cameras to observe the fish underwater. Gramps would be mortified. “Might as well dynamite ‘em,” I can hear him say.
I suppose it’s just as well. The youth of today, tomorrow’s hunters and fisherman, have been raised indoors on virtual reality. Without buttons, screens, controllers and digital imagery, they’d be lost.
Also, they expect to be rewarded with success no matter what they do. So Cabela’s is actually brilliantly marketing the tools that will ensure successful, easy hunting and fishing. I’m not sure it will work though; even those padded seats in a deer blind hurt your bum, and fish are really icky to touch.
– Jim Holtz is WEEKENDER columnist and former reporter for the Grand Forks Gazette
