C’è sempre qualcosa che merita di essere abbattuto dall’uomo giusto

“C’è sempre qualcosa che merita di essere abbattuto dall’uomo giusto” is a pioneer saying that the narrator’s father often repeated. The maxim joins a language of moral rightness to the act of shooting, and its force comes from the hunting practice that the surrounding account describes.

Wording and Attribution

The saying is introduced as an old pioneer adage, not as the father’s original formulation. He made it his own by repeating it often. Its central assertion is categorical: something always merits destruction, and the right person is entitled to do it.

The Saying in Practice

When the narrator was eleven, his father first took him onto the prairie to shoot birds of prey. The account connects those outings to the narrator’s lasting reverence for firearms and his skill as a sharpshooter. The father grouped hawks, goshawks, California condors, and golden eagles under a disparaging label, and also shot red-tailed vultures, which he regarded as filthy and without purpose. The maxim’s language of deserving targets thus sits beside a childhood practice that extended beyond animals considered dangerous to livestock.

Narrative Significance

The saying supplies a rule of judgment for the father’s conduct: violence is presented not as arbitrary but as an act justified by the shooter’s moral authority and by the target’s supposed worthlessness. The narrative places that certainty beside the child’s initiation into firearms, making the adage both a paternal lesson and a compact expression of the worldview through which the lesson is taught.