Deer season leaves me cold.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

I DON'T "GET" hunting.

As some 100,000 deer hunters prepare to take to the Oregon woods Saturday for the 2002 season, I find myself again puzzled, intrigued and ultimately unclear about what drives people to shoot animals for sport.

I'm sure this column will anger hunters, PETA, vegans, men, women, Hamm's lovers, a handful of close friends and Randall Eaton, author of a book called "The Sacred Hunt."

Against such odds, let me restate my premise: I simply don't understand the allure of pulling a trigger and killing an animal, then skinning it, bringing it home and packing it in the freezer. (And, yes, I understand that that's how people once survived in the pre-Safeway days, the freezer notwithstanding.)

I'm not philosophically opposed to hunting. I eat meat and don't oppose the killing of animals to provide that meat. I don't dislike people who hunt; in fact, roughly half of my friends are hunters, some of whom are among the most selfless, giving, honorable human beings I've been privileged to know.

I'm just curious about how I could have so little desire to do something that so many people get giddy about this time of year.

There are, it seems, a couple of schools of thought on hunters. Some would subscribe to author Eaton's belief, stated in promotional literature, that "hunting may appear to be egoic domination of nature, but from the inside the hunter's relationship to the animal is precisely the opposite, one of kinship, interdependence and transcendence."

And some would subscribe to the belief that most hunters just want to get away from their wives, get drunk and shoot Hamm's beer cans off stumps all night.

Neither, I realize, accurately describes the bulk of hunters, some of whom aren't "guys" at all.

I'm trying to avoid stereotyping all hunters as the yahoos I remember from my Bend days, the guys who mounted their deer heads atop the cabs of their trucks.

It's too easy to pass off whatever sport or hobby we don't personally "get" as somehow "bad." I sail, and am amazed at how many nonsailors see the sport in images of blue-blazered snobs a la "Gilligan's Island's" Thurston Howell III. (I've yet to see Mr. Howell at Fern Ridge.)

So I don't think hunting is bad. But, like boxing, I just don't connect with the ultimate goal.

I USED TO BELIEVE the only thing worse than watching a baseball game was watching a doubleheader. But once I learned the intricacies of the game - the strategy that most miss - I became fascinated by it.

But, though I've been invited numerous times, I have little interest in experiencing hunting to see if I might like it more.

Much of this, I'm sure, is because of my upbringing. Most people who hunt, I've found, were raised in families that hunted. Most who don't, like me, were raised in families that didn't. Other than state-fair pellet guns, I have never shot a weapon in my life, nor have I considered myself the lesser for not having done so. Further, I don't consider one's ability to accurately fire a gun as a sign of supposed "manliness."

But I have too many memories of camping in places where drunken people with guns were firing away in the night.

I have too many memories of Mr. Shepherd, who lived two houses away in our cul-de-sac, skinning his deer in the garage in front of the whole neighborhood.

I have too many memories of opening the newspaper after deer hunting's first weekend and reading about someone shooting his best friend.

I know, I know. The sport is getting safer; in the past 20 years, deaths from hunting in the United States have dropped from more than 200 a year to about 100.

I understand the challenge of hunting, the fun of getting away and the camaraderie of others (though if you buy that line in the guys-around-the-fire-drinking-beer TV commercial about this being "as good as it gets," you don't need a six-pack, you need a life.)

I understand my friend who prepares for hunting with the ritualistic exactness of a priest preparing for Mass; I do the same thing with Duck football, including when and how I transfer my tickets into my wallet.

I understand that hunting can bond, say, fathers and sons or connect someone to their pasts in a special way.

But dead animals, blood, the danger of getting shot, the sound of rifles interrupting the silence of a forest - sorry.

Why spoil all the good stuff with having to kill a deer, which, left on its own, will die no more tragically than the rest of us?

Bob Welch can be reached by calling 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].