To the effort to validate my take, I preface with my bio:

Hunting Family

I grew up for 19 years in that very part of New Jersey--just 45 minutes from New York City. All of the men in my family hunted, collected guns, and gutted and plucked their own kills.

They belonged to hunting lodges and treated a boy's first trip to NJ state parks or in Pennsylvania as a rite of unavoidable passion. Even if you were a boy who didn't dig guns you did it and liked all the illegal liquor and strange boredom and absurd elder figures.

The ethic was "take 'em out in one shot or don't take the shot." But funny thing that you don't hear about this sure fire method; more often than not you don't make that instant kill shot. You may deal a lethal blow to an animal but chances are its adrenaline will cause it to sprint in a bloodletting panic and you have to hope that you find your kill before another band of hunters does.

That's just for starters. Nugent's fantasy of hunting as a cut and dry deal is just that. It's not evil. I never liked hunting or game meat or guns outside of BB guns--and I have shot a variety of firearms as a result of my gun nutty family (my dad had a dealer's permit, my eldest brother has an expertise in firearms that goes back to the beginnings of the technology. They reloaded their own ammo, cleaned their guns with the same infatuation that a woman gives her self a pedicure.

I know the average solid hunter and Ted Nugent is not one. He's a cartoon of one. Nuge is the type who give hunters a bad name or lump all folks into a bogus gung ho-ism in between the silences; disallowing contrary opinion.

But to spotlight how stupid and malicious Mr. Full Brontal Nugenty is requires taking apart his own words.

Real hunters don't eat exotic recipes made with their kills. Nugent’s effort's to normalize his needy attention grabbing hobby is goofy. Recipes like: Sweet 'n' Sour Antelope, Pheasant Chow Mein and Bubble Bean Piranha à la Colorado Moose are a joke. The average lifetime hunter kills one deer if they're lucky per hunting trip--several pheasants, rabbits and maybe a wild turkey on those seasons. They or their wives would pluck and gut and the meat would either be butchered there or sent to a butcher and packaged for labelled freezing. That frozen meat wound up at annual hunters club gatherings and maybe three times a year made an appearance at a dinner table. Only the hunter would indulge. Not the family.

This is because most Americans are consumers. Even those who are vegetarians don't typically have the resources to grow all their own stuff. Mostly, our country is full of consumers. They don't have to hunt, raise, kill, forage, stoke for the winter. Those who do don't live in the woods, they sleep on sidewalks and live in stolen cars and flop at shelters.

Ted is stuck on this notion that we're mainly protein gobblers in our fleshy bods. We do have some pussy-looking canine teeth which evolved after desperate diets of buffalo, and birds and fish. But our mouths are mainly made for greens. For all Uncle Ted talks about science and his assurance that they can do miracles, he fails to acknowledge that most experts say that humans live longer and better when they adopt vegetarian diets. I'm not a veggie or vegan. I grew up in a household of meat and potatoes rural folk and in the boom years of grocery stores. I can tell you though since I cut down on meats, I've effortlessly lost weight and felt better.

Ted's pride of land that he stocks with living things to be killed is a silly substitute for the true hunter's life he stoically celebrates.

Hunting is not Nugent's focus, publicity is. Attention is. Money is. Yes he gives back, we hear all about his planting of trees every year all over . . . several times in this one interview. When he needs to show what a great guy he tears down 'that Butterfly gal' and restates his Johnny Appleseed ethic.

What he fails to acknowledge, despite his conviction of authority on issues of the environment, is that most anti-logging and wild life activists are not questioning the replanting that goes on in this country. Replanting is as vital to the planet as air is to our lungs. Uncle Ted declines to differentiate between very old growth trees and the thousands of saplings he gifts the planet with. He doesn't get that each old tree is an ecosystem for the tiny wildlife that support his muzzle loaded targets.

He bitches about knowing about the need for clean water to supply the hunter's philosophy and lifestyle but I doubt he's a member of Ted Danson's ocean rescue organization. It's unlikely that he speaks in congress about the dumping, the over-fishing, over-stocking, and general misuse of the country's water bodies.

The Osbournes I: Doomed Kids

Certainly Nugent has spent the majority of his press time that coincided with the release of his 'hunting and cooking book' portraying Sharon Osbourne as a Machiavellian puppet-master and his 'good friend' who he 'really likes', Ozzy, as an addled former addict with no discipline or control over his life.

If he'd really watched The Osbournes he might notice that it takes a huge degree of focus and discipline to go on concert tours, publicity appearances, and video shoots while being at home and or with his kids on the road and being a full time open communicative stern parent.

If Ted thinks Ozzy's kids are doomed, then I hate to think what his pressured to be perfect and repressed children have done and will do, being too afraid to share with him.

But moving on his shpeil . . .

Third World Meat Industry

Ted's reliance on white trash grocery store staples that are pure chemicals (made by factories that pollute the world with exhaust and waste) is an example of his righteous hypocrisy. A true cook, a real down home wife of a real hunter would likely grow her own onions and use em instead of Lipton's onion soup. For all his purist shit he doesn't appreciate the pungent flavor of a live onion? Velveeta? It's good for mac and cheese and it's not much better than the powdered crap that most people buy.