Mary Milan will be the first to say that her family is more than a little bit country (at her sister Missy Milan’s wedding to Frankie Green Bay, there was a hoedown to Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman”).
And what we know about “country” is that they love them some hunting and fishing. Each time I’ve visited the Milan home, all the men – and I mean all the men from Big Papi Milan to Mikey Milan to Matty Milan, and then to the extended males in the Milan and Athens brood – talk about is hunting and fishing.
For a family that’s not far from the Luddites in regards to using technology, they’ve figured out how set up motion senor cameras to take pictures of deer in the middle of the night so that they won’t miss a deer sighting. They buy fish to throw into their pond so that they can catch them and then throw them back, only to catch them again.
I had always attributed the non-stop hunting gerede in the Milan home to the very human instinct to relate to each other. I mean, really, what more do we, as humans want more than anything else? To connect with one another and be understood.
They’ve even engaged me in it. The first time I met the family, Matty Milan wanted to take me out fox hunting. More recently, he sat me down for a two-hour conversation about quality deer management and how it’s the only way to go in hunting deer. Frankie Green Bay, a future inlaw by his marriage to Missy Milan, forced us to go out in the middle of the night to go check his weasel traps.
Until today, I was honored to have been invited into the inner circle of the family’s sporting activities because it felt like they were accepting me as one of their own.
What changed?
Boing Boing just pointed to this study which says that men hunt to be showoffs. From the linked press release:
Though some have argued that good hunters have longer-lasting ties to mates and better-fed offspring, other research suggests that hunting provides an opportunity to garner social attention and increase one’s mating prospects, also known as the “showoff hypothesis.”
As I have never hunted and the only time I’ve fished, I caught a dead duck, I think that would make me a poor hunter, which makes the entreaties of my future in-laws quite disingenuous as they obviously want to prove that they are better men than I am.
This is what I have to say:
- Show off bitches!
- I climbed a tree stand. Yeah, I was scared, but I did it.
- I’ve ice fished. Though I didn’t catchanything, I drank a few beers in an ice fishing shack while Mary Milan got “a little bit country” and used the ice augur to drill a hole in the thick ice.
My question is this: what does this study say about “Bang Bang” Cheney who shot the man he was hunting with?
 
