This sort of made me chuckle.

BISMARCK, N.D. — Troubled by the sight of bloody deer carcasses hanging off cars and pickup trucks on North Dakota’s highways, state legislator Duane DeKrey proposed a law requiring hunters to throw a tarp over their kills.

He might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on his back.

The bill caused such an uproar that he withdrew it on Monday, just days later.

``Some of it was even a lot more vitriolic than I ever dreamed it would have been,’’ said DeKrey, a Republican representative from a rural district in and around the town of Pettibone. ``It was quite evident which way the bill was going.’’

This is, after all, a state of avid hunters, a place where the right to hunt is enshrined in the constitution.

(``Hunting, trapping and fishing, and the taking of game and fish, are a valued part of our heritage and will be forever preserved for the people.’’

It is also a place where hunters proudly display their deer tied down to the roofs of their vehicles or thrown into the back of open pickups.

DeKrey, a hunter himself, is not squeamish about deer carcasses but said the sight makes hunters look bad and could hurt the sport.

``It’s about keeping the testosterone lower when you’re going down the highway and showing off your big buck,’’ he said. ``Some of it is a little over the top.’’

I fail to see why people would be any more upset by a deer carcass in the back of a passing pickup than they’d be walking down the rows of dead meat, butchered pigs and gutted fish at their local supermarket.  If people can’t stomach a visual of what their meat looks like before it’s on their plate then, well, too bad.

The pettiness of some people never ceases to amaze me, nor does the way many of these people will turn to government power to banish the things that upset them from their sight.  I mean, really, just about any action movie or action show on television has footage as bad or worse than what you’d see in the back of a hunter’s pickup.