Double Hamster on The Rocks

Even though I can remember details of the circuit, from the first jump, to the double and tabletop jumps, to the curve near the high embankment right before the finish, my memory for particular races is obscured. It stands, for example, in sharp contrast to my memory of particular crashes, the jump competition, and a memory of a more vivid prepackaged dove massacre.

The prepackaged dove massacre took place over the course of an hour on a single afternoon in the field that ran alongside the racetrack parking lot. It was conducted entirely by one man in a floppy hat with boots and a gun. I noticed it only because I was hanging out around my Dad’s truck, waiting for him to finish a conversation so we could drive home.

It worked this way: the man with the floppy hat and a gun had a big pickup truck filled with cages. There were one or two doves crammed into each cage. He would set two to four of these cages out in the field at one time, open the cages using a foot trigger, and shoot the birds in mid-flight as they tried to escape. He was a very good shot: not one of the birds made it more than ten meters off the ground. I know that he’d been doing this for at least an hour because everyone at the track could hear the gunshots. I don’t remember anyone else watching, though. Bear, Delaware was duck hunting country and so this practice may have been common.

I’m not sure how many doves he went through but the truck was full of cages and I’m not sure why this bothered me since I’d grown up in hunting communities and had none of the reservations that, let’s say, a PETA or PETD member might have about the situation. I can remember feeling at first very sorry for the doves and then obsessing, over the next week, on their particular situation. I could not figure out a single escape route or technique that would have given even the best dove a fighting chance. It wasn’t the killing that made this a terrible scene, but the methodical quality of the prepackaged dove massacre. It occurred to me then, probably at the age of seven, that there were situations which were both fatal and inescapable and not a matter of choice at all. Since then, I’ve always kept an eye out for these sorts of situations but the dove massacre remains the best example, even better than the flashlight and air rifle rat hunts that the neighbors used to have.