Roger, one of our regular readers, posted the following letter he wrote which was printed yesterday in the Missoulian, under the heading “Hunting and fishing.”
: Humans show their thirst for blood
The sports killing season of 2013 is upon us. In Montana alone, “sportsmen” will kill around 19,000 antelope, 40,000 deer, 300 wolves, 1,300 black bear, 200 bighorn sheep, 200 moose, 20,000 elk – then there are turkeys and an assortment of other birds to kill.
It is sporting tradition. Wyoming will kill even more elk, having had record years the past 10. The states of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Wisconsin will push wolf-killing as far as they think they can get away with and not risk re-listing. Montana sells $19 wolf tags to kill five wolves.
Then there is the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, which kills around 72,000 coyotes each year and around 28,000 other animals, a million animals a decade.
Then there are the poachers of Africa, and the sportsmen who go there to kill dwindling populations of elephants and rhinos and lions.
We, human animals, are overfishing the oceans and threatening sharks, whales, bluefin tuna and other marine life.
Then there are the slaughterhouses, which will kill a billion chickens worldwide and millions of cattle, pigs and sheep each year. Now conservative state legislatures are pushing every year, despite what the American people have opposed over and over, the opening of horse slaughterhouses.
Animal shelters “put down” (kill) thousands of dogs and cats each year because there are too many and too few homes for them.
You would think that humans are primarily bloodthirsty carnivores, something as scary as the worse aliens you can imagine, which we are.
Roger Hewitt
Great Falls, MT
Exposing the Big Game 
Brave and Ethical comment in such a backwards, blood thirsty environment, although I get threats here in CA from these sociopathic killers that give me that look that if they could get away with it they would rape and kill me… like they do the environmet and animals ..
I’ve often thought this. When I photograph wildlife, I always think that other species must view us as abject monsters. We are lucky they tolerate us at all, with the atrocities we commit. By the way, Jim, have you ever found a reliable figure for how many animals are killed by hunters each year? I read estimates of 200 to 400 million. But that can’t be right. It certainly doesn’t account for the many wing-shot birds who get away with injuries (one study showed that it could be as high as 2 injured for every 4 killed). Those figures must just be the animals taken with tags, and not including species like pigeons, coyotes and others that none of our agencies care about legally or otherwise.
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As a long-term, former resident of Helena, MT I’m gratified to know that there is at least one intelligent, right-thinking, brave man (Roger) still living in that benighted state. If you want to see what type of pond-scum he is living amidst and has to contend with, click onto the comments section of the newspaper’s letters section and read the illogical, puerile comments and baseless ad hominem attacks in response to his letter.
Bravo! Roger. It takes a real man to stand up and speak truth to trailer trash.
Personally, I don’t bother reading the inevitable rabid comments from hunters when I write to papers in Montana (where I used to live as well). They just get me pissed off and distracted from the cause of helping the animals (I get too busy hating them to think straight).
Most experts estimate that in the past few years humans have killed a minimum of 150 BILLION animals each year, solely for the purpose of eating them. Some people believe it may be closer to 200 billion. This includes land animals as well as sea animals. This is not including animals killed for “scientific research” (in parentheses because most of it does not yield accurate results), animals killed in “shelters”, or animals killed simply because they are in way of “human progress” (wildlife that is inconvenient to humans trying to make money or build more human habitats, etc.).
There are currently an estimated 3 times as many living “food-animals” as there are living humans in the USA. The waste from “animal agriculture” causes more pollution than all the “vehicular” pollution in the world (this is also an enormous cause of pollution of the world’s oceans). Experts estimate that over-fishing may be the leading cause of the world’s oceans dying off completely within 50 years. I talked to a retired physicist the other day who said that he believes we cannot clean more than 5% of the pollution in the oceans. Once our oceans are gone, we will not be long for this planet.
If we came up with an algorithm that could calculate JUST AN ESTIMATE of how many animals humans have killed from the day we started killing them ’til today (I really suck at math, or I would do it myself), the number would be so huge that some people would break down crying and/or commit suicide from guilt.
It is for these reasons ALONE, and not necessarily any others, that I feel that everyone on this planet should be Vegan from now on. We’ve done SUCH AN INCALCULABLE AMOUNT OF HARM for so long, does it not seem fair that we try not doing ANY harm for the rest of the time we have left?
Thanks for sharing the shocking truth and startling figures, Colin. Your last paragraph spelled out the reason I’ve been vegan for the past 15 years or so: I do not want to contribute ANY more harm on the Earth or her inhabitants.