Now, I know this seems like a strange title for a blog, but there is a method to my madness. As I have watched the news and read my papers for the past few weeks, I keep seeing more and more sexual harassment headlines. Make no mistake about this, as the father of two grown daughters in the workplace, I find this situation serious and offensive to me. What many folks may not realize is that humans are not the only mammals that can be sexual predators.

So, how does this story begin. We once had a guest who is now deceased, but he has many friends who still hunt with us; so I will not divulge his name. Somewhere in our rate schedule, this guest (let’s call him John) must have believed that harassing management was a part of the package plan. Now, John was never mean or nasty, but he always wanted to argue about how or why we ran Riverview a certain way rather than the way he ran his company. He could sometimes be abrasive, but he was never mean. I also appreciated the fact that he confined his torture to me rather than the staff. I have always believed that one mark of greatness is how one treats those below him on the socio economic scale. John was nice to everyone except me, and he was always combative with me.

Now, here is where the dog, Fudge, enters the picture. Fudge was a serial rapist, and he did not discriminate between sexes. He may have been our first bisexual dog. At any rate when a male dog attacks a female dog that is not in heat, it is a very painful experience it. Fudge did that in the back of John’s jeep one morning, and the guide had to call for both Fudge and the female to be picked up. By then, I had had enough with Fudge. I asked Mr. Bobby to take him to the vet and have him castrated. As a funny aside, my best friend was with his grandfather once when they were castrating hogs. He asked his grandfather.” Papa, what are they doing to those hogs?” His grandfather replied, “we are performing brain surgery”. Now, my friend was young, but he was fairly certain that the brain wasn’t in that part of a pig’s anatomy; so he pressed his grandfather a bit until he replied, “We are changing their minds from a- – to grass”. Well, it was also time to change Fudge’s mind from indiscriminate sex to quail hunting.

Meanwhile, that day at the lodge at lunch, John wanted to put me through the paces by asking what kind of discipline did Fudge receive. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “we had him castrated”. I then added, “John, down here we have a way of handling animals or people who prove to be habitual problems, and Fudge got the more lenient sentence.” Well, John could have sung in the church choir for the remainder of his visit. He kept hunting with us for years, and sometimes when he would begin to get a bit out of line, I would just casually whisper in his ear, “do you remember Fudge?” That was all it ever took to make him straighten up and fly right. I have been blessed to live a most interesting life. The best and the brightest have come through our doors for 60 years now, and I can truly count on one hand the guests whom I did not like. John did not fall in that category. I placed him in my “challenging guests” category.

I hope everyone had as enjoyable of a Thanksgiving as the Cox family did!