sickening slaughter

Many of us were required to learn about William Bradford from public-school history books, who was/is an historical figure credited (or debited) with the First Thanksgiving in North America as the holder of a musket and gunshooter of a turkey then used as a meal with Atlantic-coast "Indians".

Apparently this historical event is commemorated each year with annual "hunting seasons" that specify which species can be targeted and killed -- although 'hunting' as a word does also refer to the search to find and carry away creatures already dead in the forestlands.

'National Parklands' were concurrently established as a way to provide sanctuary for blameless creatures and also as recreational areas for people to congregate. Within the past five decades, the intent to expand some Scouts of America training camps to full-service parklands was inevitably communicated to wildlife, which have been necessarily reacting to the space constraints of the encroachment (as example, a child harmed during conflict near a waterhole in TN).

To add some bit of countermeasure to such reaction, a large rock upon which wild creatures would in the past relax and sun themselves within close proximity to such a training camp in PA was removed and placed in a sinkhole on the grounds of the University of Pittsburgh campus at Bradford, PA (UPB), where a continuous confusion of wildlife is now exploited with concomitant continuous slaughter during the scheduled "hunting seasons" and also occasionally when the creatures 'trespass' on city or private lands. Sometimes those are pushed onto the properties of firearm holders or into a direct "line of fire" during hunting season, not altogether a difficult task when directing the creatures southward as a direction toward which they normally migrate anyway during the wintertime.

This year, a woman is missing from Ashville, last seen at an automobile dealership in Jamestown, New York (reference: wesb.com) bearing the same surname as a 67-year-old man in Martin County, FL, who directed the recent Presidential elections in the region (reference: Palm Beach, FL, television broadcast). The missing woman has not yet been found in that now-snowy northeastern United States region, and an article this week posted in the Bradford Era newspaper/wesb.com website reports about an 'Above average kill on opening day of bear season', of "...111 bruins, 93 from McKean County, PA..." where the UPB campus is located, at the state line with New York. Another such article was titled, 'Potter County leads first day bear harvest', as "The top...with 152...".

As a slaughter continued because the various species continue to focus upon and move toward 'The Rock' in Bradford Township, there is perhaps some reason to suspect that the disappearance of the missing woman might have occurred as a way to justify the firearm action in a region whose populations must survive knee/waist-deep snowfalls and extreme temperatures in some ways normally buffered by bears hibernating or ranging about in the forests to find frozen carcasses.

Since firearm discharges and firecrackers are also used to warn people in the region from time to time as a way to ensure the safe operation of an oil refinery, some sympathy for the confused and directly-hit at close range wildlife is entirely justifiable.