Homicide, life in the woods

For those of you who listen to country music, this will make complete sense... for those who don't? This will make complete sense.

Troy Lee Gentry, half of the group Montgomery Gentry and the little guy without the Amish hat on the right, is up on charges that he all but snuck up on a sleeping, deaf bear and killed it with a machine gun. The reality is that he was a step or two away from that.

According to the reports he bought a tame bear from a Minnesota man, then "hunted" it in a pen, shooting it with a bow and arrow. This opened a whole can of bees on talk radio here this afternoon.

You had callers who hunt bears who said "real" bear hunting was a lot harder than this and others who said this sounded about right when it came to how a bear hint works. Hunters from all over the area were calling in and it was pretty entertaining for an hour or so on a slow sports day.

One of the first callers was trying to explain bear baiting, where a hunter hangs a bag of trash in a tree for weeks or months leading into hunting season and when Yogi comes for his free lunch later in the year, there's a hunter waiting to pop him in the skull.

Now that's a sporting chance.

Back to Gentry, though, he allegedly hunted this thing in a fenced in pen about the size of the Metrodome's playing field. No word on if that was the baseball field or the football field.

He even went so far as to film the whole episode and re-edit it to look like a draining hunt so he could show his buddies what a real man he is... heh.

My favorite call of the day was from a good ole boy from Gentry's home state of Kentucky who called it chicken-shit hunting and kept calling Gentry's entire family a group of clowns. He also pointed out that regardless of time in the pokey and up to 20 grand in fines, the worst part of this for the singer is the complete loss of dirt road cred.

This is at least three times as funny when you consider that these two jerkoffs have built an entire career around being tough guys and real Southern boys. It would be a bit like finding out that Kid Rock goes to bed at 9:30 every night with a small glass of wine and a good book.

The strange thing? They're booking him for mis-tagging the bear as "wild" because there's no real law against shooting a tame bear in a small pen, just if you falsify the records about where you shot it.

This apparently has something to do with whether or not you can stuff the bear or not. Uh-huh, right.

I think that regardless of how you feel about the morality of hunting or in this case, execution-style bear removal techniques, it comes down to one of the e-mails the show got in the middle of the afternoon, who said that this is like losing you virginity to a hooker. Sure, you technically had sex, but you didn't really earn it, so where's the sense of satisfaction in that?

I think the thing that will ruin it for all of the fans who get off on the group's image will be this little tidbit - the bear's name before he iced it was Cubby. Yeah, you're all man when you shot an animal that shares a name with a Mouseketeer.

(Photo from charlottesvillepavillion.com / chaffeezoo.org)