Or You Could Skirt The Issue And Use ‘Kilt’

A Spokane man named Paul recently wrote with a question that’s haunted me for days: “Why is it that the word ‘killed’ has to be used by you so much?”

Yikes! And I thought I was a sensitive guy.

“That is a terrible sounding word to most people,” Paul said. “Can’t you say that you caught 20 fish and released all but two? Why is it necessary to say that you ‘killed’ two?”

Answer: I don’t want people to wonder what I did with the fish if I didn’t release them. That’s how rumors get started.

Perhaps if I wrote, “The salmon was dispatched,” the event would be more palatable, even though the fish would be no less dead.

However, to write, “Billy-Bob took three trout,” would sound as though the angler were a thief. To say, “Mary Lou harvested a kokanee,” would suggest she was trolling with a combine.

The issue becomes more troublesome in writing about hunting.

Do you immolate a deer, or do you terminate it? To simply say, “The buck was shot,” could lead to speculation that the deer had been wounded and left to suffer.

Animal-rights zealots also are selective in using the K-word.

A few years ago, the Progressive Animal Welfare Society filed suit to stop a special hunt authorized to cull a starving deer herd in a fenced military installation on Puget Sound.

After the hunt was scuttled, even the zealots agreed the number of deer had to be reduced within the installation.

But PAWS didn’t kill the deer. Instead, they allowed researchers to euthanize the animals with bullets to their brains.

If I were writing an outdoors column for a specialty publication, I could abandon the K-word for substitutes that would be familiar and, thus, inoffensive to that audience.

For a veterinarian’s journal, I could say, “The hunter aimed at the cougar and put it to sleep.”

Readers of an auto racing magazine wouldn’t balk at a story about the hunter who exhausted the brace of quail.

Indeed, a person’s occupation could be the key in choosing appropriate K-word synonyms.

Furniture salesmen would be comfortable saying they liquidate their ducks. Gardeners might simply nip a spike elk in the bud.

Judging by the telltale ring in their hip pockets, most rodeo cowboys would prefer to snuff their quarry.

A carpenter could hammer a lunker bass, while a mechanic would throttle it.

A priest might be inclined to sacrifice his cottontail; a fire fighter could extinguish it.

The postal worker doubtless would use his 12-gauge to cancel a turkey. The president might prefer to veto the flight of a pheasant, while the ambassador to France might issue the coup de grace.

I’m not convinced the K-word is more offensive than other terms for the taking of a life. Whether a sportsman kills or negates his quarry is of no more consequence than whether he broils or bakes the meat.

The key to a sportsman’s image is not whether he bags his game. It’s the demeanor with which he does it.

Among some 500 articles I’ve published in the paper in the last year and a half, our computer library search system indicates that only 37 stories included the word killed.

That’s less than the body count of one Bruce Willis movie.

Meanwhile, Bonnie Harris, one of the newspaper’s police reporters, used the K-word 75 times during the same period.

A good word should never be wasted.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review