Oryx for dinner

I was sitting in the kitchen having lunch with the other volunteers this afternoon when the owner walked in with Bully (his great big hunting dog). Bully was filthy and the boss was looking very sweaty and had blood on his clothes.

They had just come back from hunting an oryx for dinner. The owner had shot a “young female” oryx. When asked why he didn’t shoot one of the bucks he grinned and said “I don’t like young females” trying to get a rise out of the three young females at the table. But really the animal in question had just been standing at the right angle to get a good shot. He says he shot too low and Bully went racing after the wounded oryx the run it down and corner it. A second shot brought the animal down.

There is no sport hunting on the farm anymore. Most of the animals have been restocked after they stopped cattle farming in the 1960s and opened the property up as a guest house (the first in Namibia). There are some sport hunting farms that ship animals in just so Rambo types can chase them down and shoot them. A neighboring farm offers sport hunting of leopards and the boss is appalled and trying to get it stopped. The guest house proudly boasts “Three Flowers” which is an ecological rating for resorts. However, there is minimal, sustainable hunting for supplying the kitchen.

Since we’ve been eating nothing but beef for the last two weeks, it will be nice to have oryx for dinner. Hmmmmmm, oryx. It tastes just like beef, but it has a much cooler name so I can now bore people at dinner parties in California with the subtle differences. “Yes, indeed, this steak tastes somewhat like that freshly killed oryx I had once in Namibia. We sliced a bloody chunk of roast right off its haunches. I bit into the bullet and it nearly broke my teeth!

” My future plans include become an insufferable bore!