Responding to an on-line opinion page invitation about the hypocrisy that hunters sometimes face, I decided to outline my own progression of the controversial activity of hunting, beginning in my Iowa boyhood. Little did Guy Reynolds know that his son, Steven, and his Fox terrier, Bridget, would become a rat killing duo on Des Moines Street, at the Burlington-Northern railroad tracks clear past Dean Avenue, on Des Moines' Eastside. When I was about eleven years old, I hunted Norway rats that frequented the railroad tracks by the thousands near my east Des Moines neighborhood. In the shadow of towering grain elevators, my Fox terrier, ‘Bridget,’ and I valiantly tried to reduce their population every Saturday morning whenever possible. I routed them out from under giant sheets of wire-reinforced cardboard boxcar liners lying about in the grass, as one after another, Bridget snapped their backs and shook them until they didn’t move. Despite their apparent suffering, no ...