Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

For some reason this story just really makes me sad. A very young hunter has recently made a once in a lifetime kill. His prey was a rare Albino (white) deer.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /17652845/

I know people love to hunt deer and this is the deer hunting season and I have no problem with those who must hunt and kill for the sake of having food on their table, etc. I even have members of my own family who love deer hunting or used to anyway before it got so ridiculously expensive to go hunting and before the deer population in our area seemed to deplete. I have even accompanied a family member on a deer hunting trip once before, however, the group of deer we saw was so beautiful that no way would I allow them to harm a hair on their head, so that was the last deer hunting trip for me, lol, and thank goodness for that!!

Anyway, I guess the point I am trying to make here is that this story makes me so sad because this was an exceptional and unusual case...a rare white deer!! Why kill such a rare beautiful animal? Although to me all deer are beautiful animals. Why not try to save it and let it live either in the wild or perhaps somewhere in some animal habitat, a zoo, or some such place? From reading the story it seems that the deer was the object of many hunters looking for it and would probably have wound up this way at some point and time no matter who killed it. Just sad that such a rare animal could not have been saved somehow.

I completely agree with both of you. I feel hypocritical for being compassionate for animals and not being vegetarian, but there does seem to be something wrong to me with killing other living things for the fun of it. It just seems kind of inhuman to me.

But yeah, this story touched me on a lot of levels. It's kind of sad to me to think that this deer somehow survived a debilitating mutation, a trait that would have made it much more vulnerable in many ways in the wild, and probably evaded a host of natural predators only to be killed by some kid with a bow. There's some sort of cosmic irony in that.

Also, this really reminds me of the Welsh story of the deer hunted by the spectral white hounds of Annwn. Albino animals are really neat. I remember seeing a story about an albino alligator on Animal Planet a few years back, amazing animal, it's gotta be really tough to be ten feet long and bright white and still be an efficient stealth predator.