In so many ways, animals are the same as you and I. Mothers give tender loving care to their babies and will fight to the death to protect them. Parents may go without food to feed their young. They play games, have tempers, get jealous, frustrated, angry, feel the loss of loved ones, pain, anxiety, hunger, happiness, and sing with joy at just being alive and most of all, their lives are precious to them and they will fight tooth-and-claw to keep it. Yes, they have the same emotional attributes you and I have.

Best of all, the animals we call wild are free, free from human imprisonment and enslavement. They’ve managed themselves for millions of years without human interference.

Then, men with guns appeared. Five billion passenger pigeons once darkened the skies of this land, now not a single one is alive today. Sixty million buffalo were callously slaughtered, left to rot on the prairies, and had not 260 miraculously escaped detection, hidden away in a remote valley in Yellowstone, the bison too would now be extinct.

All the wolves were slaughtered by guns, poison and traps to the last whimpering pup; other animals were also victims of these idiotic genocides. And there are those who say the bison and wolves should be exterminated again. Some management.

A recent letter implied it was OK to kill an animal if the kill was clean. Well, no death in the wild is clean, no, not from the barrel of a high-powered rifle, or painfully caught in a steel trap waiting for their executioner to bludgeon them to death.

Yes, their lives are as precious to them as ours are to us. They are different in that they kill to survive and not for sport or a few silver dollars.

Leonard Stastny,

Missoula