Animal rights activists call for ban on “traditional” hunting games

2013/05/02 Taipei, By Yang Shu-min and Maia Huang

May 2 (CNA) Animal rights activists on Thursday called for a ban on traditional hunting contests by indigenous tribes, saying such competitions are a form of animal abuse.

The indigenous peoples’ traditions of hunting animals to show respect for their ancestors and Mother Earth often involve cruel actions such as torture of the animals, said the the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan and some indigenous activists.

Furthermore, catching animals for fun and hunting pregnant creatures shows no respect for life and violates tribal traditions, said Chen Yu-min, director of the society.

The organization displayed video footage of a contest that showed about 200 people hunting squirrels and tearing the live creatures apart.

Such abuse hurts not only the indigenous culture, but also Taiwan’s international image and its tourism industry, the organization said.

It said that since 2009, at least 28 animal hunting contests have been held in 18 townships in nine counties across the country — all in the name of passing on traditions and cultural heritage.

Although hunters from indigenous tribes are excluded from the country’s wild animal protection laws, participants in such competitions could face animal abuse charges, said Lin Tzu-ling, general secretary of the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association.

Lin urged the Council of Indigenous Peoples, Council of Agriculture and tourism-related agencies to help promote animal rights and push for the abolition of hunting games across the country.

 

Vegans—Not Hunters—Are the Best Environmentalists

Originally posted on April 22, 2012

You’ve probably heard the cliché, “Every day is Earth Day to an environmentalist.” Well, it’s true actually, at least to a true environmentalist—the kind of person who makes daily choices based solely on their concern for our planet and the life it supports. The gal, for example, who chooses not to eat farmed animals because of the enormous amount of abuse (not to mention gargantuan carbon footprint) inherent in those Styrofoam and shrink-wrapped packages that clog the sprawling meat isles across the country; or the guy who does not hunt because wild animals are a part of the living Earth he loves and respects.

Eager to look like the sensible ones, conventional environmentalists often assume the wobbly, half-hearted stance of dismissing, rather than embracing, the animal rights movement. On the other hand, dedicated animal rights advocates don’t shy away from calling themselves environmentalists. They know that only by adopting a vegan lifestyle can one truly be an environmentalist. Vegans understand that the Earth cannot sustain billions upon billions of hungry bipedal carnivores and they recognize that the surest way to ease suffering for all is to eat lower on the food chain—in keeping with our proven primate heritage.

Absurd as it sounds to folks who really do care for the planet, certain atypically adroit sportsmen have been caught spreading the dogma that gun-toting Bambi-slayers actually have a “love for the land” and a concern for the animals they kill—that murdering animals is a wholesome Earth Day activity. Proselytizing hunter-holy-men try to downplay the obvious lethal impacts hunting has on individual animals and entire populations, wielding one of the weariest—and wackiest—of all clichés, “Hunters are the best environmentalists,” despite well-documented proof that hunting has been—and continues to be—a direct cause of extinction for untold species throughout the world.

Over-zealous hunters completely eradicated the once unimaginably abundant passenger pigeon and the Eskimo curlew (both killed en masse and sold by the cartload for pennies apiece), the Carolina parakeet (the only species of parrot native to the US) and the great auk (a flightless, North Atlantic answer to the penguin).

Hunting is the antithesis of environmentalism. The very notion of the gas-guzzling, beer-can-tossing hunter as an environmentalist is laughable even to them. Show me a hunter who is not antagonistic toward the rights of animals and I’ll show you a rare bird indeed.

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Portions of this post were excerpted from the book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport: http://www.earth-books.net/books/exposing-the-big-game

 

Stop Calling Them “Human” Rights

Although lately the media (including the “liberal” New York Times) has been busily trying to drag us back to the Stone Age by promoting hunting, I still have to believe we’re gradually evolving overall as a species. Therefore, it’s time to suggest we stop using the term “human rights,” when talking about things that should be considered basic rights for all species.

The human race doesn’t need anything else singling it out to stroke its over-inflated, collective ego. Differentiating between human and non-human rights just encourages those who sneer or scoff at the idea of animal rights. Call it fairness, justice or common decency; or call them natural rights or individual rights. Better yet, why not just use the term animal rights and include human beings in with our fellow animal individuals, all deserving of kindness, consideration and respect.

This notion of human superiority is for the birds.

—Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved

What Bill Maher Forgot to Mention

Although Bill Maher is a staunch and righteous animal rights defender, he must have forgotten to mention,…the suppression of non-humans and the pumping of hot air into an overinflated human ego thereby giving them the sense of entitlement to exploit, enslave and kill animals at will. Unfortunately, most folks don’t interpret “Thou shalt not kill” to include non-humans. Maybe if the bible had suggested that ALL animals were created in God’s image, people would be a bit more humble.

MFWP Sued Over Lynx Trapping

Today the Missoulian reported that:

- Three conservation groups filed a federal court lawsuit Thursday against Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks commissioners and Director Jeff Hagener for allowing trapping and snaring in Canada lynx habitat.

The Friends of the Wild Swan, the WildEarth Guardians and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies say FWP reported at least nine incidents since 2000 of lynx being caught in traps set for other species; and say four of those animals died. They alleged that this violates the federal Endangered Species Act, which lists lynx as a threatened species and warranted for protection, and want the trapping prohibited in lynx habitat.

“In one instance, a young female lynx was found in a pool of her own blood, with extensive muscle damage, and an empty stomach — all from lingering far too long in a cruel, steel-jawed trap,” Wendy Keefover, carnivore protection program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. “Montana allowed this unnecessary death, which impedes lynx recovery, especially when it involves potential breeding animals.”

The lawsuit outlines some of the cases in which lynx were caught and died, including one that starved to death. 

Yes, you read that right, a lynx STARVED TO DEATH in a trap! Obviously there’s no 24 hour trap check required for species like bobcat or whoever trappers are “legally” targeting. How many more precious animals have to bleed to death, lose limbs or starve in traps before the world wakes up and trapping ends for good?

No Right

Animals are Conscious, but Do Hunters Have a Conscience?

Not that it should come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever befriended a dog or cat, or watched birds in their backyard, but in July 2012, respected scientists met in Cambridge and went on record to affirm that non-humans are conscious. Belated as the matter has been in gaining acceptance, their “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” was a welcome step in the right direction for the world’s most continually oppressed and victimized—those born of species other than human.

The declaration asserts:

The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates. …

Okay, that may sound like a bunch of academic hullabaloo, but in layman’s terms, animals are indeed conscious beings. Though not really a profound revelation, the fact that non-humans are not automatons runs counter to hundreds of years of accepted belief (thanks to the fifteenth century French mathematician, Rene Descartes) that’s been used to justify untold animal cruelties for far too long.

In recent decades, the science of cognitive ethology has clearly put to rest grandiose notions of human superiority—besides perhaps the extent of human narcissism.  Nowadays, none but the most agenda-driven or willfully ignorant can claim unfamiliarity with the fact that non-human animals exhibit awareness and have the capacity to experience pain and fear, along with pleasurable feelings and emotions.

So if irrational Cartesian rationale for cruelty to animals is outmoded thinking, how then do hunters justify the virtually unprecedented abuse of our fellow Earthlings going on in the name of sport today? Could it be that sport hunters lack a conscience for all but our own kind?

As you’ve probably heard, British rocker and staunch animal rights activist, Morrissey, canceled his scheduled performance on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” show this week due to a planned appearance on the same night by the cast of “Duck Dynasty” (a “reality” program which focuses on a family that became wealthy by making tools for their fellow duck hunters.)  The singer released a statement on Monday saying he “cannot morally be on a television program where the cast members of Duck Dynasty will also be guests.”

Morrissey also stated: “As far as my reputation is concerned, I can’t take the risk of being on a show alongside people who, in effect, amount to animal serial killers.”

Serial Killers? How can he liken avid, good ol’ boy duck hunters to serial killers, one might ask? Well, easy. Both serial killers and duck hunters act without conscience toward their multiple victims, whom they depersonalize and objectify. And both kill others to boost their self-esteem, some even going so far as taking trophies of their victims’ body parts.

The next question scientists need to address is, assuming that hunters are conscious animals, why don’t they have a conscience?

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved

Good Questions

On Facebook this morning a friend had posted a photo of a cruelly confined pig at a factory farm desperatly chewing on the bars of her cage. A caption read, “If your God had wanted us to eat animals, do you really think he would have given them the ability to feel pain and fear? What kind of sadistic individual would that make him?!”

Good questions. Taking it a step further, I have to wonder…if god had wanted us to eat animals, do you really think he would have given us the ability to feel their pain and fear?!

Unfortunately, empathy and compassion are not doled out equally to all.

Some people feel them so strongly it literally pains us to hear about the brutalities inflicted on nonhumans by their fellow man. The sadness is outweighed only by the understanding that many of the animal cruelties are so widespread and so accepted by society it will require nothing short of a major revolution in thinking to put an end to them. For those of us so well-endowed with empathy and compassion, every KFC, Arby’s or McDonalds commercial, every shiny photo ad for this weeks’ meat and dairy specials at the local market, every camo-clad nimrod in a pickup truck sporting an NRA bumper sticker inspires feelings of grief, anguish or anger.

There are those, Temple Grandin, for instance, may be able to feel empathy but apparently not compassion. Her autism allegedly allows her to experience the fear and anxiety factory farmed animals go through, yet her lack of compassion allows her to work for the animal industries, helping to spread the absurd, feel-good myth that some animals are “humanely” raised (and slaughtered), thereby giving consumers a license to ignore any twinges of empathy or compassion they might have.

And there are many who are completely incapable of feeling empathy for others. They’re the lucky ones—if hollowness, selfishness and superficiality are to be considered enviable traits.

More Unnecessary Animal Suffering

At the risk of inciting absurd accusations of misanthropy, I want to talk a little bit about animal experimentation. Don’t worry; I won’t make you hear about all the hellacious, gruesome, twisted and/or morbid things non-human animals are put through in the name of medical science. (If you don’t already know what goes on in those torture chambers they call animal testing labs, please go here or Google animal experimentation.)

What I want to look at is just how unnecessary all that animal suffering is. Not only are there other ways to reach the same conclusions, sans the insanity of experimentation, but the fact is, many of the drugs on the market today are simply superfluous. And many of the illnesses and conditions big pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry have us fearing on a daily basis—through obnoxious and irresponsible ads for their products in every medium—are avoidable, preventable or unlikely to ever threaten us.

How many times have their drugs, though tested endlessly on animals, done people more damage through side effects than the ailment they were said to protect us from? And how many nonhuman animals continue to suffer needlessly because of a national obsession with health care created and fueled by the world’s fastest growing industry?

 

The Infertile Union

So you don’t get the idea I go around unfairly picking on small grassroots groups, here’s an excerpt from my book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport, wherein I take on the Goliath of all national green groups for siding with hunting…

Sport hunters have enjoyed so much laudation of late they’re beginning to cast themselves as conservation heroes. What’s worse is that many modern, influential green groups are swallowing that blather, hook, line and sinker. Maybe they ought to reread the words of Sierra Club founder, John Muir:

“Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the meantime we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hale, red-blooded boys are savage, fond of hunting and fishing. But when thoughtless childhood is past, the best rise the highest above all the bloody flesh and sport business…”

Henry David Thoreau, another nineteenth-century nature-lover whose forward-thinking writings were an inspiration to Muir, cautions, “No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

If those dated messages and mockery are lost on twenty-first-century Sierra-clubbers, Edward Abbey’s sentiment should be obvious enough for anyone, “To speak of harvesting other living creatures, whether deer or elk or birds or cottontail rabbits, as if they were no more than a crop, exposes the meanest, cruelest, most narrow and homocentric of possible human attitudes towards the life that surrounds us.”

Early vanguards of ecological ideology recognized Homo sapiens as just one among thousands of animal species on the planet, no more important than any other in the intricate web of life. They also abhorred sport hunting.

But a shocking turn-around is taking place in the current bastardization of the environmental movement. The Sierra Club and other large, corporate green groups are embracing (read: sleeping with) powerful hunting groups like the Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association (NRA). In a transparent effort to appear down-home and therefore more in touch with nature, they’re making the fatal mistake of joining frces with sportsmen whose conservation “ethic” exists only so their preferred prey species can be slain again and again.

The infertile union between super-sized modern green groups and mega-bucks hunting clubs must have been sired by their shared conviction that humans are the most crucial cogs in the wheel of life (or at least the squeakiest wheels in the dough machine). As the only animal capable of coughing up cash when the collection plate comes around, human beings (every last gourmandizing, carnivorous one of them) are the primary concern; their wants must be given priority over those of all other species. Contemporary environmental organizations, seduced by a desire to engage as many paying members as they can get their hands on (regardless of their attitudes towards animal life), must believe blood-soaked money is as green underneath as any.

Forever stagnating in “thoughtless childhood,” members of hunting groups like the NRA live for the day they can register a record-breaking trophy with the Boone and Crocket Club—formed by Roosevelt “to promote manly sport with rifles.” Fund for Animals creator, Cleveland Amory, took issue with the sporty statesman in his anti-hunting epic, Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife. A benevolent humanitarian for humans and nonhumans alike, Mr Amory wrote, “Theodore Roosevelt…cannot be faulted for at least some efforts in the field of conservation. But here the praise must end. When it came to killing animals, he was close to psychopathic. Dangerously close indeed (think: Ted Bundy). In his two-volume African Game Trails, Roosevelt lovingly muses over shooting elephants, hippos, buffaloes, lions, cheetahs, leopards, giraffes, zebras, hartebeest, impalas, pigs, the not-so-formidable 30-pound steenbok and even (in what must have seemed the pinnacle of manly sport with rifles) a mother ostrich on her nest.

But don’t let on to a hunter your informed opinion of their esteemed idol, because, as Mr Amory points out, “…the least implication anywhere that hunters are not the worthiest souls since the apostles drives them into virtual paroxysms of self-pity.” Amory goes on to say:

The hunter, seeing there would soon be nothing left to kill, seized upon the new-fangled idea of “conservation” with a vengeance. Soon they had such a stranglehold [think: Ted Nugent] on so much of the movement that the word itself was turned from the idea of protecting and saving the animals to the idea of raising and using them—for killing. The idea of wildlife “management”—for man, of course—was born. Animals were to be “harvested.” They were to be a “crop”—like corn.

Fortunately, a faithful few are seeing through the murky sludge spread where green fields once thrived. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Captain Paul Watson (founder and president of about the only group still using the word conservation to mean protecting and saving animals) recently took another in a lifetime of steadfast stands by resigning from his position on the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club. He refused to be a part of their whorish sleeping with the enemy—their pandering to sportsmen by holding a “Why I Hunt” essay contest, complete with a grand prize trophy hunt to Alaska. To think of how many trees were needlessly reduced to pulp for this profane effort when the answer to why hunters hunt was so succinctly summed up in just one sentence by Paul Watson, “Behind all the chit-chat of conservation and tradition is the plain simple fact that trophy hunters like to kill living things.”

Just as the naïve young girl who falls for the charms and promises of a sunny sociopath learns, the hard way, about his hidden penchant for abuse and violence, the Sierra Club and other middle-ground eco-friendly groups may soon learn the dangers of looking for Mr. Goodbar in all the wrong places. How will they divorce themselves from this unholy alliance when the affair goes sour and sportsmen reveal their malicious, hidden agenda by calling for another contest hunt on coyotes or cull on cougars, wolves or grizzly bears to do away with the competition for “their” deer, elk, moose or caribou?