Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

11-7-89 . . . I had a busy day. First I attended an Alliance for Animals meeting at the university, then I drove home to have my hair cut, and finally I bought seventy-two dollars worth of groceries. When people say that I live in an ivory tower, I laugh, because I know that I’m as much a realist as anyone else. I have a healthy sense of what ordinary people believe, value, and desire. But every now and then something happens that makes me reconsider. For example, when I entered the barber shop this afternoon to have my hair cut, an old Ted Nugent song—“Cat Scratch Fever”—was playing on the radio. I joked to the young woman who was about to cut my hair that it must be an oldies station. This led to a discussion of hunting. I remarked that Ted Nugent is an avid hunter and has suggested that young people buy guns and go hunting rather than take drugs. “Stalking and killing animals will give you a natural high”, he is reputed to have said. I expected the woman to laugh with me, or at least find the idea repulsive, but she did just the opposite. She said that she enjoys hunting and wishes she could go more often. Whoa! It got worse from there. When I suggested that hunting was wrong, she thought for a minute and said “That’s not what I was taught”. “But you’re an adult”, I said. “You can think things through on your own; you don’t have to settle for what you’ve been told.” This must have come as a shock to her, for she didn’t say anything for several minutes. It turns out that this woman is a socially conservative Christian, the sort of person who accepts whatever is traditional and questions nothing. I’m aghast that there are people like this. Maybe I live in an ivory tower after all.