Unless you’ve been living under this little rock instead of on it, you probably know that there’s no love lost between the pro hunting lobby and me. The truth is however, that there are hunters who are also members of my immediate family and, I love them dearly. We can’t hold a decent conversation about the burning spring hunting subject without going for each other’s throats of course, but other than that, we’re still family.
I have to admit however that whilst I’m usually very good at separating an act I dislike from the person doing it, I find it very difficult, sometimes even impossible, to separate the act of hunting from the person practicing it.
You see, the way I see it is that going out to hunt in spring is a regular, well thought out activity and the opening of the season is long waited for. It’s not a random act of cruelty that occurs as a result of some emotional moment. It is not an act of brutality that happens during some moment of crisis or emotional flashback. It’s not an act of mercilessness that comes as a result of residual emotional build-up or, some terrible living situation. Hunting in spring is a blatant act of cruelty, during which, living, breathing, flying creatures are shot out of the sky, butchered with a zillion lead pellets, and killed just for fun, when they are on their way to procreate. Nice!
It is because of this pre-meditation and the pleasure derived from the act of hunting, that I find it easier to see good in a man who bursts into aggression in a moment of anger, than in a hunter who wakes up in spring, morning after morning looking forward to shooting some innocent, living, feeling, creature, knowing that it won’t be able to raise its young, just because it gives him pleasure.
When it comes to hunting (also known as shooting defenseless birds out of the sky with lead pellets that don’t necessarily kill their target on the spot but leave it to die a slow and painful death) there is an unacceptable dose of pre-meditated pleasure that I find incongruent with being a good person.
It’s a known fact that most hunters are born into hunting families, and from a very young age, they’re told that hunting is a traditional pastime that their ancestors practiced, and because they think highly of their ancestors and can see that they are mostly good people, they can’t see the wrong in it. They grow up desensitized to the pain and cruelty that they cause to birds and soon start to believe that birds don’t feel much, certainly not in the sense that humans do. They soon conclude that since their fathers and grandfathers were hunters and also essentially good people, then there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with continuing the tradition.
And growing up with such beliefs, they may have hardly ever thought about the fact that the number of birds will decrease also because of this `traditional pastime`, if they continue to practice it just as their ancestors did, without taking into account the basic sustainability principles such as – don’t hunt animals when they are about to procreate. In their ancestors' times birds where plentiful, but the conservation situation nowadays is much different, and must be taken seriously.
Truth is that most hunters wouldn’t shoot at anything else but birds, and not only because it’s illegal but because they haven’t been desensitized to anything else but birds. This desensitization is how they manage to live without remorse after shooting bird after bird out of the sky, and how they unwittingly pass on their cruel pastime to their children.
So please, even if you don’t give two hoots about the birds; if beaked creatures don’t tickle your heart, or if you’re not hot or cold about the matter, on the 11th April you should still vote NO, because the less opportunity we give people to take pleasure in inflicting pain, (whether on humans or animals), and the more opportunity we give to life and procreation, as opposed to death and torture, the better a world this will be.