Reader Mail: Hunting in the Middle East

Scott, Tim and I have certainly appreciated the comments we have been receiving so far. In the interest of encouraging more I thought I would respond to one.

A concerned reader complained about how -- in my post yesterday on Ashura -- I'd written that the now rarely-practiced Shia bloodletting ritual was a kind of male-bonding experience not so different from the shared fellowship of American fathers and sons who hunt together and who put their taxidermied trophies on the wall at home. The reader said that this was a classic example of the "Hate America First" syndrome.

I'm sorry if I gave that impression. Just to set the record straight: I love hunting. I'm an avid (if not always accurate) duck, deer, and upland bird shooter.

In fact, I wish I could write some stories about hunting in the Middle East for you. Unfortunately, hunting here tends to come in two varieties. Either the under-regulated, and often illegal, kind carried out by average guys in countries with mountain ranges or river systems; Or the wildly expensive falconry expeditions organized by wealthy Arab aristocrats from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries.

Bird hunting is very popular in Lebanon, judging from all the gun shops one sees in mountain villages and in the Bekka Valley. Unfortunately, with local attitudes to traffic laws and income tax codes as a guide, I don't have a lot of faith that Lebanon's hunting regulations are obeyed or enforced, and I'd rather not contribute any more to the depletion of the country's already fragile natural heritage.

And as far as falconry expeditions are concerned, I would have a hard time explaining to the accountants at TIME why I needed to rent a radar-guided hubara bustard migration tracker, an all-terrain RV, and a golden eagle. If you are really interested, however, I'll try.

But to the more important issue. I made the connection between the bloody Shia ritual of Ashura with a blood sport like hunting because I expect that a lot of you who aren't from the Middle East would think it's, well, weird. But really, don't you think it's also a little weird when you walk into someone's home and there are more animals on the wall than in the Museum of Natural History? I mean, Teddy Roosevelt has been dead a long time. But the point is that these practices -- as controversial as they are -- incorporate similar themes of blood, death, tradition and manhood.

Personally, I think every red-blooded American man should be allowed by his wife to decorate his home with one -- and preferably only one -- piece of taxidermy. But perhaps that's why I'm still single.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut