Licensed Western hunters can lack basic knowledge of what they kill

Evidence

My friend is the town clerk in a small Adirondack village. In the summer and fall there is a line outside her door for fishing and hunting licenses. With every laminated card, she hands out the harvesting regulations, pocket-size booklets on thin newsprint, printed in black and white except for glossy inserts with photos of the actual prey, just in case people don’t know what they’re shooting at. It happens: every year there is a story about triumphal deer hunters being stopped on the highway with a Jersey calf tied to their bumper. … A friend of mine once worked at a hunting check station during partridge season. A guy drove up in a big white Oldsmobile and proudly opened his trunk for inspection of his take. The birds were all neatly laid out on a canvas sheet, lined up beak to back with plumage scarcely ruffled, a whole brace of yellow-shafted flickers. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 644

Categorization

• SHARE: The Jersey-calf-tied-to-bumper and flickers-in-trunk hunting anecdotes are exactly the kind of absurd particular the reader files away as memorable evidence.
• CANDY: The triumphant hunters hauling a Jersey calf or a brace of protected flickers are funny, tweetable demonstration that license-holders may not know their prey.