The sport of death

[ebonlock]

The ever eloquent James Wolcott chimes in with a different perspective on the Cheney "hunting" accident:

Andrew Sullivan quotes an eloquent chastisement from Matthew Scully, author of Dominion: The Power of Men, the Suffering of Animals, and a Call to Mercy, regarding the callous disregard demonstrated by Vice President Cheney.

"Birds are not skeet. They are living creatures, 'the fowl of the air,' and it is unkind and dishonorable to treat them this way. The sportsman shoots in jest, to paraphrase a saying, but the creature dies in earnest."

I saw a creature die in earnest earlier this afternoon on CNN. Rick Sanchez was filing a report on hunting protocol and safety, tramping through the woods with a pair of experienced hunters. At the end of the segment one of the hunters shot a quail, which fell from the air and landed in the grass, its wings thrashing. An animal died so that the segment could make its point. And it made me realize or re-realize that I don't have any respect even for "responsible" hunting, because the deaths it causes are still wanton and unnecessary, even if the carnage is less promiscuous than that of the canned hunts favored by Cheney, Scalia, and similar Davy Crocketts on male-bonding expeditions.
[...]
Rich guys pretending to be Jeremiah Johnson is one of the many fascimile editions of rawhide authenticity being successfully peddled in the media with no one willing to stop and say that inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on animals should be a source of sin and shame, and that the decent thing to do would be to break Cheney's shotgun in two before anyone or anything else is harmed by his buffoonery.

It's easy to lose sight of this point when one is busy chorteling over the inanity of the incident. I've been rather guilty of that over the past few days myself. I too have never seen the appeal in the violent death of another living creature, and frankly labeling this activity a "sport" is borderline offensive as far as I'm concerned. It's as much a sport as stomping on ants is, destroying life because you're bigger, stronger, better armed, and in the end, because you can.

Comments

[ebongreen.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your respect for the lives of other creatures on the planet.

OTOH, as humans hold sway and influence in multiple forms over nearly every square cubic centimeter of this planet, it seems more responsible to me to sanction and manage hunting and fishing as a means of (a) providing food to a still-hungry planet and more importantly (b) preventing over-breeding among and environmental damage from prey species. Deer, in particular, have a tendency to co-exist well with human-influenced habitat but poorly without adequate predation.

We're the ones who largely eliminated wolves and cougars from the landscape; as I see it, it's our job to replace them if we want healthy ecosystems. That means either bringing back wild predators (better) or killing wild things ourselves.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

However, I don't think any of those neccessities apply in this case. The birds are domestic, apparently raised in pens and released just in time to be shot.
I'm not even certain that Mister Vice President was planning on eating quail for dinner--I don't know protocol for these sorts of hunting trips, but I've heard that on one of Justice Scalia's hunting trips, he personally shot over two dozen ducks. (Of course, the corpses may have been donated to charity for the underpriveleged to eat.)

[ebongreen.livejournal.com]

Understood. So there's hunting, and there's "hunting" = live target practice; ethically different, yes?

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Ummm. I'm not sure.
I mean, the ends are the same. Sustaining life entails destroying life, but either form of hunting can either support or abuse this premise. The ethics of raising animals to be killed probably rests greatly on the treatment of the animals while they're alive.
I suppose, ethically speaking, the best way to handle it would be to raise plants to be killed. The energy cost is less, and (to my knowledge) it is harder to raise them in an abusive atmosphere.

[ebongreen.livejournal.com]

I suppose, ethically speaking, the best way to handle it would be to raise plants to be killed. The energy cost is less, and (to my knowledge) it is harder to raise them in an abusive atmosphere.

... which, as I understand it, is one of the premises of Diet for a Small Planet and many pro-vegetarian philosophies.

Personally, I'm less about who's eating what than how many of us there are eating. I don't want more food or less meat; I want fewer people. A lot of problems will probably take care of themselves if there weren't quite so many of us...

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

A position I agree with, but did not think to include in the parameters of the original debate. (:
Unfortunately, such a discussion requires either (a) not having sex or (b) making sure that contraception is easily available. Large scale implimentation of either, I suspect, will be nearly as hard as convincing USAns to eat less meat.

[ebongreen.livejournal.com]

HIV - among other things - will have its way with nations and (sub-)cultures who refuse to deal with contraception in a realistic manner. I hate to see people dying, but if it takes famine and plague to make a saner planet, I guess I'm for a saner planet in the long run.

Though large parts of this country are doing their level best to convince me otherwise, I remain a believer that in the end, truths in physics and biology WILL HAVE THEIR WAY over human fucked-upp-edness. It's not a matter of "if", just "when".

Believing that is one of the things that keeps me at all hopeful about living.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

I mean, they're *quail*. Tiny little birdies that are a couple of mouthfuls apiece. What's so macho and manly about blasting them to bits?