Heather du Plessis Allen: Pet or pest a cultural view

Kid Rock, right, holds his mountain lion.

Chances are you've probably never heard of Kid Rock. He's not the kind of character who appeals here. He's long-haired, tattooed, and pulls the fingers in photos. He loves guns and America's gun owners love him. They turn his music up on their stereos and don't even care if the whole trailer park can hear it.

He's not been getting much publicity since breaking up with Pamela Anderson. Until now. Kid Rock has found a new passion. Hunting.

He and his hunting-enthusiast mate recently shot a cougar. The mate put the grinning picture on Facebook. Kid Rock has his arms wrapped around the huge fluffy cat's belly, holding it up for us all to see.

Shooting it was a damn riot, his mate wrote. And good on Kid Rock, he went on, for "saving all those mule deer, elk and livestock by whacking this magnificent mountain lion". That's not a totally direct quote. We had to insert the punctuation.

Anyway, Facebook went feral. Redneck. Murderer. Four letter words with "tard" attached to the end. Threats to take to his momma.

What's Pamela going to think, cried a Baywatch fan. There were more nasty posts than you could read before running out of phone battery.

Of course, a few hunters tried to point out that the cat population needs controlling. Apparently, cougars are killing indigenous animals. It didn't help. Someone just retaliated with a threat to call Isis on Kid Rock.

Right now, a handful of the Crusaders may empathise with the musician. They've copped it, too.

A few months back, a group including Tom Taylor and a couple of the Whitelock boys took time out between games in South Africa to put some lead in a zebra. Some of us howled with outrage. The Crusaders stood firm. It was legal, they said.

The outcry probably comes largely from those of us who've spent our lives surrounded by city buildings, fed by plastic-wrapped supermarket food.

In our concrete jungle, zebras are exotic. We've seen them on nature documentaries so they must be endangered. Oh they're not? Well, they're still cute with all those black and white stripes and far too special to kill.

But what about cows? Why aren't they too special to kill? Maybe it's that they're less exotic. Or maybe it's that they'll die quickly, unlike those poor wild animals who struggle on, not killed, but hideously injured by the hunter's bullet.

Yet, a pain-free death for livestock isn't a given. Sometimes cows maim themselves on wire fencing humans erect. Every winter the cutest of lambs freeze to death in South Island paddocks humans pen them in.

Sometimes the anti-hunting folks will compromise a little with those who hunt for sport. Okay, okay, they say. You can do it as long as the animal is a pest. Like tahr in the Southern Alps.

Just don't tell anyone in India because they mightn't like it. Tahr are nearly extinct over there. And please do hunt the possums. You'd be doing us a favour. Just don't tell the Aussies. Australians think possums are really cute. Exotic, almost.

Which brings us to the point that our objection to hunting is probably quite often an emotionally charged product of our lifestyles.

Living in the city ain't so bad, but it does mean you can go a whole lifetime without handling a gun or killing your food. You might not understand hunting for sport, but then you probably don't understand synchronised swimming either.

Kid Rock is not the best person to use as a champion for anything really, except maybe this one time. We mightn't like his music, but we can just keep ignoring it. Can't we just ignore his chosen sport, too?