Sarah Palin Takes Shot at Hunting Opponents
Sarah Palin responded (perhaps preemptively) yesterday to potential outcries surrounding Sunday night's episode of the TLC show "Sarah Palin's Alaska," which was centered around a father-daughter caribou-hunting trip.
"Tonight's hunting episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska 'controversial'? Really?" Palin wrote on her Facebook wall, hours before the show aired. "Unless you've never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather couch or eaten a piece of meat, save your condemnation of tonight's episode. I remain proudly intolerant of anti-hunting hypocrisy. :)"
Palin, a staunch advocate of hunting, posted several Facebook notes promoting the episode starting on Friday morning, when she publicized that the upcoming episode of the "TLC" show would allow Americans to "see how we fill our freezers and feed our families with home-grown tundra-roaming Alaskan wild game."
"We'll show you how Alaskans hunt," she wrote. "As my friend Sue says, 'the tundra is the type of landscape that will make a man out of anybody.' And, PETA..." she wrote on Facebook early Friday morning.
Palin did not attribute the sources that apparently called the episode "controversial," and PETA has not yet commented on the matter - although, presumably, some anti-hunting activists might take issue with the episode.
During the episode, Palin points out that "in many remotes areas of Alaska there's no grocery store nearby. It's four- or 500 miles away" - and that for some, hunting is the most viable means of acquiring food. Opening her own fridge, Palin notes that "we're down to just five moose packages, three caribou packages... It's time to get out there and go caribou huntin'."
The former vice presidential candidate then embarks on a two-day hunting trip with her father and a family friend - and after trying three guns and several shots, she does indeed take out a caribou.
Musician (and hunting advocate) Ted Nugent promoted the episode in a web video released on Dec. 2, in which he argues that "there is no debate" about hunting.
"There is no contest," Nugent says, in the video. "Wildlife thrives, habitat is optimized for air, soil and water production and the cycle of life with or without us will go on."
"It's really so simple it's stupid," Nugent continues.
Palin also managed to cross-promote a controversial political cause - drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge - in publicizing the hunt: "You'll also see us hunting at the edge of ANWR, where you can see the uninhabited lands that warehouse billions of barrels of American energy supplies underground just waiting for the political will to allow responsible resource development," she wrote in another Friday morning Facebook post.
On next week's episode, Palin goes camping with TLC star Kate Gosselin and her eight children.
