“And will the geese have guns, too?”

That was my friend Theresa, genially disgusted to hear I was going hunting. I am, after all, a city dweller. My food comes from Farm Boy. I have the civilized luxury of not having to look my prospective dinner in the eye. What kind of caveman deviance was this?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg creeped a lot of people out by resolving that this year he’d eat only meat he’d personally killed, like an unfortunate goat and pig whose throats he slit.

But there was a point, he insisted, to the grisly exercise: “I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have,” he wrote to Fortune magazine.

Zuckerberg added he’s not only been eating healthier food as a result, but learning about sustainable farming.

I had no such lofty philosophical goals. First of all, goose doesn’t figure prominently in my diet. Neither did the partridge I used to hunt growing up in the Ottawa Valley. Nor was this some survivalist exercise, proving my prowess at feeding myself in case of another catastrophic BlackBerry outage.

For me, it was more about getting outdoors with my stepdad on a stunning fall day and not talking for hours, so as not to alert our prey. A perfect guy outing, in other words.

In a farmer’s field, we set out decoys, two-dimensional plywood cutouts of geese, in hopes of luring the genuine articles down for a closer look. I noted uncomfortably how our tactics resembled those of Wile E. Coyote.

We hid and waited.

A wild turkey nonchalantly emerged nearby, and I was instantly lost in a mental thicket of regulations from two levels of government. Did he know his rights? Indeed he did. He was off limits to us.

My attitude toward actually killing an animal is complicated, but as it happened, the matter never came up. Not a single goose landed in that field. We shot once at a small, low-flying squadron, and may have startled them, but not badly. The geese owned us again and again as our brilliant decoy ruse failed utterly.

With my inadvertently cruelty-free hunting adventure complete, I’m reminded why city boys live in cities, and pretty thankful that those cunning birds weren’t packing heat after all.