For the sake of full disclosure, I’m not a fan of hunting. It’s not my thing and I feel strongly that hunting, especially for sport, has less to do with gamesmanship and more to do with flexing human superiority over animals. We’d hunt with sticks and bows if it weren’t. But even with my views on hunting, I tend to avoid getting wrapped up in my criticism of it, unless, of course, you’re a certain Minnesota-based dentists killing a lion. But I tend to avoid keeping off the subject when the hunt comes with some serious baggage, as a New Zealand man’s actions on social media have prompted.
She bit into its “warm, quivering heart,” Johnny Yuile said in a Facebook post, accompanied by a picture of his young daughter, Chloe, holding the organ in her teeth with blood-stained hands. He called himself a “proud Dad” and she was his “little pink ninja princess.” She was proud of her first kill. “Go Chloe!” he cheered. She explained her decision to bite into the deer’s heart was influenced by he uncle and that “it tasted quite nice.“
Despite his beaming and his daughter’s taste for Cervidae blood, social media has not been kind to this New Zealand father. The backlash toward his post has prompted the Facebook group, New Zealand Woman Hunters, to be shut down. Commentators have pointed out that the post is “disturbing,” with at least one person going so far as to call it “a touch evil.” But the purveyors of the Great New Zealand Deer Heart Feast are not without their supporters as well. One person referred to the chomping of the deer heart as a “tradition” and called the removal of the New Zealand Woman Hunter’s Facebook page “fightin’ actions,” while another person jovially commented that “this little gangsta” is “getting her right of passage in.”
But Johnny Yuile isn’t fazed by the negative press he’s received. “Chloe and I love our adventures together,” he added.
That’s really the most important takeaway here. This was one of Johnny and Chloe’s adventures. Do I think an eight-year-old girl chomping into the heart that was just removed from a deer she killed is a little messed up? Sure. There are other people who share this sentiment.
But it’s important to keep perspective. Chloe wasn’t coerced into chomping into that deer heart. She wanted to do it. Chloe nommed on that deer heart willingly.
So, while disturbing and gross, Chloe and her dad probably should not be vilified for it, even if taking a bite into a raw deer heart puts her at risk for E. coli and Hepatitis E.
Featured image via Pixabay.
h/t Raw Story
