Shoot Me Down: Stop Namin’ Bucks!

by Dave Hurteau

In Christopher Guest’s Best In Show, Harlan Pepper, who used to be able to name all the nuts, tells us that his exasperated mother begged of him: “Stop namin’ nuts!” 

I am begging you: Stop namin’ bucks. (Actually I don’t really care that much. Doesn’t make you a bad person. But….) I don’t understand why people do this. I understand why I don’t. It’s simple: I don’t name things I plan to kill. I name things I plan not to kill. That makes sense to me.

Plus it’s cheap—smacks of false familiarity. All you did was get a trail cam picture of the thing. Hardly gives the right.

Damned cheesy, too. I suppose it’s possible that it just seems cheesy to me because it’s so frequently done by cheeseballs—TV hosts who say things like: “And now let’s join Dave Hurteau in New York and a buck we call Mr. Stickers.”

Nah, it’s cheesy.

And what’s worse, the uninspired names—Big Ten, Wide Eight, Tall Seven—or the ones that try to sound inspired but are really just dumb? I picture a conference room at an outdoor-TV network where “creatives” meet to brainstorm buck names.

In 2009, a popular TV-show host killed a buck he called Mr. Gnarles Barkley.

Imagine you’re a deer. Now imagine the indignity of being named Mr. Gnarles Barkley.

And all this talk about respect for the animal: How respectful is it to name something based on a physical characteristic? Jelly Belly. Aunt Goiter.

Now, I’m absolutely not saying that everyone who names a buck is an ignoramus. (It’s probably more like two-thirds or a half.) But consider this: There is no getting around the fact that a certain number of bucks this fall will suffer the disgrace of being killed by an ignoramus; is it not doubly demeaning to have been named by him, too?

As Inigo Montoya said, “Humiliations galore.”

So there you have it. I think people should stop namin’ bucks. Stand with me or shoot me down. The reader who makes the best argument pro or con will be invited to fume his own brand of nonsense right here as a guest blogger.

Source: http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/whitetail-365/2012/06/shoot-me-down-stop-namin%E2%80%99-bucks

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