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| STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT HUNTING Each year in the U.S., hunters kill more than 125 million nonhuman animals, excluding untold millions killed illegally or left fatally wounded. To preserve their "sport," hunters verbally camouflage suffering and death. ~ ~ ~ ALLEGATION: Proponants claim that hunting is fair as well as humane. "The concept of fair chase is important to hunting," Posewitz states. TRUTH: Its importance lies in public relations and self-justification. Hunting's only chase is by dogs or motorized vehicles, and it's never fair. In snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, they chase wolves, deer, elk, antelopes, and caribous. Wild-eyed, their tongues hanging out, the terrified and exhausted victims pant or cough blood. Hunters use binoculars and high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. They use compound bows with range finders, string silencers, and mechanicle releases. They use decoys, scent lures, and tape-recorded calls. Hunters shoot nonhumans at water holes. They bait deer with corn, ducks with grain, and bears with flesh and sweets. To preserve the pretense of fairness, hunters call baiting "feeding." ALLEGATION: To maintain the guise of sportmanship ("fair honest rivalry"), hunters pretend that their victims willingly participate. Hunters describe their premeditated murder as "confrontation between man and animal." Ted Kerasote likes to believe that hunted animals "sacrifice themselves as part of an accord" with him and "permit themselves to be taken." After slaying a deer, Richard Nelson "whisper(s) thanks to the animal for giving itself to me," even if the deer had started to flee. TRUTH: Do rabbits, ducks, and deer confront their attackers? This kind of hallucinatory drivel fills hunting books and magazines. In truth, even severely injured nonhumans want to live. Categorizing hunting as "sport" or "recreation" hides its violence and injustice inside a trivial context of play and completely discounts the nonhuman perspective. Being chased, wounded, or killed isn't recreation to the victim. When a human attacks or kills an innocent human, we rightly consider the act assault or murder. Hunting, too, inflicts suffering and death on innocent victims. Hunters killl for sport, but their actions don't qualify as a sport. Hunting is ritualized murder. ALLEGATION: "I hate the word killing," a trophy-seeking hunter complains.He shuns this "murderous term," which "ruins everything." "I'm not a killer," he insists while conceding, "Killing, unfortunately is part of hunting." Instead of serial killers or mass murderers, hunters are "users of wildlife." Hunting doesn't entail killing, just "user actions." TRUTH: To avoid seeing themselves as murderers, hunters apply separate vocabularies to violence against humans and violence again nonhumans. According to hunting apologists, a "total package of recreational satisfaction" distinguishes hunting from killing. That is, killing accompanied by other fun activities isn't killing--when the victim is nonhuman. Hunters call themselves sportsmen and outdoorsmen. In this lingo, promotion of hunting becomes utterly benign "pro-outdoor activism." "Sportsmen are all under attack," a hunter sputters, although no one is objecting to baseball or golf." ALLEGATION: Hunters pronounce their unneccessary killing "life-giving." "When I kill an animal," a hunter has said, "I am celebrating life." TRUTH: Another replacement for kill (in the hunter's vocabulary), cull falsely suggests that hunters primarily kill the frail and infirm. Instead they create what naturalist Edwin Way Teale has called "evolution in reverse." Hoping to kill the "big boss:" or "big boy," hunters prefer to shoot dominant male deer, elks, turkeys, and sheep---the males most likely to guide others, defend others, and father offspring who thrive. True predators selectively kill the weak, sick, and disabled. The word cull naturalizes sport hunting and implies benefit to nonhuman communities that actually are harmed. ALLEGATION: Hunters regularly refer to nonhuman animals as crops: "the annual fawn crop," "bumper crops of pheasants." Deer are "a harvestable crop," a hunter has stated. "It's not a whole lot different than going into a field and harvesting apples every year." TRUTH: It is "a whole lot different." Unlike apples, deer think and feel. Reductive metaphor reinforces hunters' tendancy to regard nonhuman beings as insentient things.Hunters can kill sentient beings for sport because they metally reduce them to inanimate things, "physical objects" in Leopolds's specieist words. Percceived as inanimate targets, animals can't be murdered. Fatally shot, a collasped buck raised his head and licked the hand of his killer, who felt such remorse that he renounced hunting. "The deer was no longer an object" but "a living being," the ex-hunter has explained. |
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| Excerpts from "Animal Equality: Language and Liberation by Joan Dunayer (C) |
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