World's Smallest Violin dept.

Here is a delightful story about a hunter killing a semi-tame bear. There's no denying that this is pretty darned awful, but there's a sense in which you can't blame the hunter for this. I mean, you can--and should!--blame him for being a hunter (let alone a bear hunter), period, but if you're going to treat this as a legitimate thing, then, well, what are you going to do? It's not as though--per the story--there was a sobbing little girl trying to protect it or anything, so how would you even know?

That's as far as I'm willing to go with my lukewarm defense, however. The hunter himself's whining self-pity really causes any sympathy you might have had (well, I wouldn't have, but I dunno about you) to evaporate:

"With all the bad publicity, I'm not feeling very good about myself," said Price of Cresco, a 1986 Pocono Mountain High School graduate. "This may be the peak of my hunting career, and it's tainted, it really is."

[…]

"I'm definitely a little angry," Price said. "I'm a little disappointed in everybody's attitude. I enjoy hunting more than anything, and now this is tainted by it."

Yeah, just terrible, innit? You go to all this trouble to kill a tame bear like at the end of friggin' Blood Meridian, and does anyone compliment you on the size of your mighty penis? NO! They insist on concentrating on the "killed a tame bear" part of it like that's a bad thing! The horrible injustice!