I know I’ve said it many times before, but allow me to reiterate: hunting is not a sport, it’s sadism. Football, baseball, basketball and hockey are sports. Bicycle racing, marathon running, pole vaulting and shot putting are other examples.

I went skiing yesterday; skiing is both an outdoor activity and a sport. It tests one’s skill and promotes quick reactions and good balance. Skiers can challenge themselves by going faster, taking steeper runs or skiing heavier, untracked snow.

Boxing, karate, and tennis all qualify as sports; each one pits two people—perhaps not equally matched, but equally willing—in a friendly contest of skill or chance. Granted, the human hunter without weapons is not as equally suited for survival as any non-human animal. Every last squirrel, rabbit or mallard would laugh at the efforts of an un-armed human hunter.

To compensate for being the obvious underdog, sport hunters are the most ruthless, cunning, conniving and—especially in the case of bowhunters or trappers—the most barbaric and monstrous creatures to ever walk the earth. Today’s hunters who want a challenge can opt for lower-tech, less accurate equipment like bows and arrows or black powder rifles. But that just increases the chance that their living targets will get away only wounded, rather than killed outright. If they want to call it a sport, hunters should arm the animals to at least allow them a fighting chance.

The key element clearly lacking in the so-called “sport” of hunting is that both sides are certainly not equally willing. Serial killers may consider stalking and killing their victims a sport, but any sane member of society would have to disagree.

It’s high time we sane members of society take a firm stand for the non-human victims of hunting and demand an end to killing in the name of sport.