Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
I tried reading King Solomon's Mines. At one point the protagonist slaughters a large number of elephants for the sake of a meal. The waste and gratuitous carnage was repulsive to me and I believe would be repulsive to any reader of any age sensitive to the suffering of other creatures.
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I think you are sadly mistaken. Between the 1830s and 1890s (maybe 1880s), the American Bison was nearly made extinct by white hunters who wanted two things from them, their hide for buffalo robes, and their tongues as a delicacy meat. In most cases, the rest of the meat (usually between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds) was left to rot. The number of bison in 50 years dropped from the millions to at most a couple thousand.
The point is that people did, and people wrote about things, in earlier generations that we today would consider appalling. Many of our founding fathers wrote that they deplored slavery, but kept slaves anyway. I'm not sure that any current publisher would publish Huckleberry Finn if it were written today. But classic and seminal works of any era should be taken in the context of the era in which it was written. I suspect that in 25-50 years, if Liz Lutgendorff is remembered at all, they will be appalled by the views she espouses today.