My Point...And I Do Have One

all.
    My cousin Archie is into hunting, and he knows that I hate it, but that just makes him want to talk about it to me more. He called me the other day and said, “You should’ve seen it, Ellie. Heh, heh, heh. I got myself an eight-point duck.” Well, I don’t know the terminology, but it was something like that.
    Archie told me all the details, ending with him dragging the deer up to his car. Luckily, he got his license back; before, he would have had to drag it up to the highway and hitchhike. Not many people will pick up a man and a deer—maybe one or the other, but not both.
    All through Archie’s story all I could think about was that poor little innocent animal just standing around thinking little deer thoughts: “I wonder where the berries are. What’s this on my hoof?” Whatever they’re thinking. Then Archie killed him and put his head (the deer’s, not Archie’s) on the wall of his living room. “Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. I shot it. Heh, heh, heh. I killed it. No, it wasn’t doing anything to me, just standing there. What’s your point?”
    I can see if it was something that you hated, just something that you were so proud that you killed. Like a burglar. Get his last expression of surprise before you shot him. “Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. Shot him. Heh, heh. I killed him. He was coming in. Going for the Sony.”
    I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls, and they say, “Because it’s such a beautiful animal.” There you go. Well, I think my mother’s attractive, but I have
photographs
of her. “Wasn’t Mom pretty? She had great legs, too. They’re in the next room, come on.”
    I tell you, the deer heads that I feel sorry for the most are the ones on the walls of bars or restaurants. They have the silly party hats on them, silly sunglasses, streamers around their necks. These are the ones I feel sorry for. I mean, obviously, they were at a party having a good time. They were in there dancing to their little deer music, “A crossbow will make ya
JUMP—JUMP!”
Then, all of a sudden … 
ker-plow!
 … the party’s over.
    N ow, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m a strong supporter of animal rights, but I do feel that some activists go a little bit too far. For instance, going up to Alaska and throwing paint at the Eskimos because of the fur coats they wear seems wrong to me. Some activists even eliminate the middleman; they throw paint right on the animal itself (I suppose that would really be the middlemink and not the middleman). The activist says to the mink, “Why wait? You’re going to end up on somebody eventually.” But the mink is still pissed off. “Hey! I just had a bath. How am I going to get this red paint off? And don’t go telling me about club soda—that won’t work.”
    I do believe, though, that most animal testing is improper. If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn’t done anything wrong? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if some perfume irritates a bunny rabbit’s eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson’s eyes and ask him if it hurts.
    Another type of animal testing that I think is really wrong is having animals take the SATs. Their scores arealways so low, and it’s just not fair. It makes them feel stupid, but that’s only because the tests are biased toward humans. Because if you asked a person if some type of food is edible, they might not know. They’d eat it and die. An animal wouldn’t do that. But if you asked a dog, “Egg is to nest as baby is to what?” it would just stare at you. Or maybe bite your leg. Or go to the bathroom on your carpet. They feel so depressed afterward, because they just don’t know. You give them their score, and they just look and say, “Huh?” Then you have to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Doggy, but you can’t go to Harvard.”
    Even though the animals we share this earth with don’t do well on standardized tests (partially, I think, because it’s hard to fill in the circles completely with their little paws), they do have an intelligence and beauty that is all their own. It’s inspiring to me to be with them, watch them, and try to understand them.
    So, I went to the zoo today … maybe it was yesterday … or last year. It’s hard to tell when you’re writing a book. I mean, I could have gone to the zoo today, but you could be reading this five years from now. You might read