From today’s “Ask Amy” advice column…

DEAR AMY: My girlfriend and I have been together for two years. This month she gave me an ultimatum: I give up hunting, or she leaves.

Every year, my best friend and I spend the opening weekend of deer season in a cabin we built on his family’s land. It is the only weekend I hunt, and I look forward to it every year. My friend and I don’t get to spend much time together, so this weekend has been our excuse to get together, catch up and have a good time.

My girlfriend told me this year that she doesn’t want to be with someone who could kill a deer. I tried to explain that hunting helps control deer population in the absence of natural predators and that hunting is a better way of acquiring meat than buying beef slaughtered in an industrial farm and shipped across the country.

I went hunting this year against her wishes and killed a buck. She wouldn’t talk to me for three days. Now she says if I don’t promise to give up the sport, she will leave me. She says if I cared about her feelings, I wouldn’t hunt.

I do care about her feelings, and I don’t want to upset her. But I don’t think I should have to give up hunting because she doesn’t like it.

What should I do? - Befuddled in Binghamton

DEAR BEFUDDLED: Your letter is why ultimatums don’t usually work. (If I could, I’d issue an ultimatum against ultimatums.)

This issue will come up each hunting season; you now have a year of peace in which you can attempt to work out a compromise (and where ultimatums don’t usually work, compromises almost always do).

Would your girlfriend be as unhappy if you went on this hunting excursion, enjoyed the experience but didn’t kill anything? Could you square your ethical hunting argument to keep the peace at home?

You could start by presenting these two extremes with the goal of taking baby steps toward each other until you meet somewhere near the middle.

Allow me to answer this better than Amy did.  If this chick knew that the letter-writer enjoyed hunting, why did she even get into a relationship with him in the first place?  If she’s that much against hunting, she should ind some other guy, one who doesn’t hunt.

Does this chick eat meat?  The letter-writer didn’t say.  But, assuming that she does eat meat, where exactly does she think it comes from?  Most people see meat all wrapped up and tidy, in those Styrofoam trays at the grocery store.  But let’s face it…SOMEONE had to kill it!  And the fact is, conditions at commercial slaughterhouses are FAR worse than that of hunting.  And the letter-writer is correct in that if there wasn’t the annual deer hunting season, many, many deer would starve to death over the winter.

This guy goes hunting once a year.  He eats what he hunts.  I don’t have a problem with that.  Mike has a lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association, and as such, gets a subscription to  any one of their many magazines that he chooses.  He chose to get something called “American Hunter”, because he thinks he might like to go hunting someday…after we’ve moved to Maine, of course.  Forget about getting a permit for a hunting rifle, or any other gun, around here…’tain’t gonna happen.  Plus, when we have our own house, we’ll have room for a chest freezer in which to store all of that meat.

So if he wants to go out and shoot a deer, fine with me.  All I ask is that he does not haul a whole dead deer carcass into the house and expect me to butcher it.  Another thing that ain’t gonna happen.  In areas where hunting is popular, they have butcher shops where you can take the dead deer or whatever, and they’ll cut it up for you, into cookable-sized pieces.  He can do that, oh, yes, he can!

But I’ll be more than happy to cook it and eat it.  And if Mike wants to take the head to a taxidermist and make a trophy to hang on the wall, that’s fine with me as well.  As long as the rest of the animal is used for food, where’s the harm in having a souvenir?

I might ask that he hang it in his toy train room, though.  I don’t really want my house in Maine to have that hunting lodge decor style, yanno?

Anyhoo, if this guy loves his annual hunting trips, and this woman keeps threatening to leave him over it…if I were him, I’d tell her not to let the door hit her on the ass on the way out!