Tag Archives: hunting

To Wildlife, They’re All Assault Weapons

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During last night’s debate, the president accused his opponent of pandering to the NRA by changing his stance on so-called “assault weapons.” The accusation is valid—former Governor Mitt Romney also pandered to the pro-gun lobby big-time by tapping die-hard “sportsman,” Paul Ryan, as his running mate. But at the same time he made the accusation, President Obama pandered to the NRA himself.

Though Barack Obama has never been a hunter (to his credit), he was quick to give oral tribute to hunters and “sportsmen” who use their weapons regularly and repeatedly (albeit “legally”) to assault the non-human citizens of this country. At the risk of showing his hand, I’d speculate that if it wasn’t for the power of the National Rifle Association to make or break an election, the president, deep down, would ultimately prefer to see all dangerous weapons banned.

Though they tiptoed gingerly around the subject, both candidates agreed that all guns are dangerous in the wrong hands. From the point of view of the wildlife, all weapons are assault weapons—and all hunters are the “wrong hands.”

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

The Dreaded Day is Upon Us

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I awoke this morning to the sound of angry gunfire. Not just the occasional, distant pop, pop but a constant blam, blam, blam symptomatic of wartime—or of people shooting blindly into a whole flock or herd of fleeing animals. I knew it was almost “general deer season,” but this sounded more like the kind of mindless blasting that goes on during goose and duck season in the winter months around here. So I checked the Washington “game” regulations and sure enough, an all-out “incredible war on wildlife” (as Cleveland Amory put it) had begun!

Not only is Oct. 13th (fittingly) the opening day of deer season, it’s also an early opener on ducks and geese today as well. From now until the end of November, no deer, elk, goose, duck or bear is safe from human harm. Meanwhile, species like cougar, bobcat, fox or raccoon will be under the gun until mid-March. And coyotes, crows and other “common” animals can be killed year-round in this supposedly blue state. The only beings not on the list of allowable targets are six endangered species (who of course were driven to the edge of extinction by overhunting decades ago).

I knew this dreaded day was coming; I just hoped it wouldn’t get here this soon. On the bright side, this is also the first day of a long streak of steady fall rain storms which should make for some rusty guns, water-logged campsites and miserably wet nimrods.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Somebody Definitely Needs a New Heart

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Normally I would feel sorry for a girl born with a rare heart disease that requires her to get both a heart and liver transplant. But when 11 year old Kaitlynn Bessette of Stetsonville, Wisconsin, shot a 335 pound black bear through the heart, she lost all my sympathy.

Why is it that when some people suffer adversity they feel the need to take it out on others? And what is going on in the mind of a pre-teenaged girl that makes her want to kill a magnificent animal like a bear anyway? How can a person who knows all too well what it’s like to be the target of undeserved misfortune say, “I felt thankful, like really thankful I shot a bear”? Are kids today reading or watching too many stories, such as “The Hunger Games,” where the heroin is a huntress? Or maybe they’re playing too many violent video games, like “Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 2012” (available for only $79.99 in Xbox or Wii).

Of course, Kaitlynn wasn’t out there on her own; she had the help of the Wisconsin-based “United Special Sportsman Alliance,” a hunting group that grants wishes for children (most of which no doubt involve killing animals). They must have lured the bear in with bait and had Kaitlynn safely stationed in a tree-stand close enough for an easy kill, since she wasn’t even looking when she pulled the trigger: “…I held the gun as steady as I could, I turned my head and then I shot.”

After learning that her daughter had killed a bear, her mother said, “I started instantly crying.” Crying would be an appropriate reaction to hearing that a bear’s life was just unnecessarily ended or learning that your youngster was a murderer, but Mrs. Bessette was crying tears of joy instead of sorrow, “…it was amazing.” Kaitlynn’s father was equally pleased with the carnage, “She’s a good kid. I’m really proud of her.”

The family plans to mount the bear’s remains on their wall to keep the memory alive. Had the child been satisfied with taking only a photograph of the animal, both the memory—and the bear—could live on.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Nine Signs You’re at a Paul Ryan Rally

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Nine Signs You’re at a Paul Ryan Rally:

9)  All the babies are in cammo diapers

8)  Senior citizens seen fleeing in mortal fear

7)  Secret service guys are the only ones carrying concealed weapons

6)  Has-beens, wanna-bes and never-weres (such as Ted Nugent and Kid Rock) are crowding the stage, hoping someone will recognize them

5)  Rapists are handing out cigars, in the tradition of proud fathers everywhere

4)  The candidate looks like a scary version of Eddie Munster

3)  Fang marks left on all the babies he’s kissed

2)  Instead of shaking hands with voters, Ryan is trading deer sausage recipes

1)  Some Bubba is going around bragging, “I bought my 10 year-old girl a rifle and I’m gonna teach her how to kill a deer this year!”—wait a minute, that’s the candidate!

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Paul Ryan Is Out to Corrupt His Little Girl

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The hunting industry’s motto must be: “Get ‘em while they’re young.”

Being the diehard “sportsman” that he is, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is taking that maxim to heart. Yesterday he told ABC News his daughter has watched him hunt for years, and he’d already bought her a Remington 700 .243 junior model rifle last Christmas.

“She’s going to get to go hunting this year for the first time,” Ryan said. “She’s 10 years old, so she can hunt starting at 10. I just need to get her some clothes.”

What kind of clothes? Why camo, of course. No doubt sensing a photo op, Ryan stopped at the Forest Park, Ohio, Outdoor World and paid $101.14 in cash for camouflage gloves and a jacket.

Females are supposed to be the more caring and nurturing of our species. How is teaching them to murder animals at an early age a good thing? Unless we want a world full of conscienceless, compassionless killers, it isn’t.

A normal young girl’s natural reaction to seeing a beautiful creature killed is shock, sadness, revulsion or repugnance. But if her father praises her enough when she brings down her first victim, there’s a chance she’ll end up thinking that she somehow enjoys it. From then on, when she sees a deer or rabbit, she will think of the praise she received; she’ll see them simply as trophies to mount on the wall; or she’ll envision them butchered and reduced to bloody lumps of meat. She’ll always be a little twisted in her perception of our fellow beings.

Years later, after a string of failed marriages, alcoholism, suicide attempts or a criminal record for child abuse or other violent crimes, in addition to a lifetime of inner turmoil, she might eventually seek psychiatric counseling. Only then will she realize that her problems began on the day her father first praised her for killing an innocent, sentient animal—the kind that she used to think of as beautiful.

And this Ryan guy wants to be our vice president? Considering the way he plans to corrupt his little girl, I’d want him to stay the hell away from my daughter.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

The Wolf was Better off Endangered

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Paradoxical as it may seem, wolves were better off endangered.  Not as a species perhaps, but to the individual wolf stuck for days in a steel-jawed leg-hold trap, or to the pack forced to dodge a hail of gunfire from cammo-clad snipers and a volley of arrows from a phalanx of archers, it must feel like the misguided war on wolves has begun anew.

Now that they have been declared “recovered” here, wolves are again under threat of the trap and rifle just as they were during the environmentally reckless Nineteenth Century.

By 1872, the year President Grant created Yellowstone National Park (in part to protect “game” species like elk from wanton destruction by overeager hunters), 100,000 wolves were being annihilated annually. 5450 were killed in 1884 in Montana alone, after a wolf bounty was initiated there. Wyoming enacted their bounty in 1875 and in 1913 set a penalty of $300 for freeing a wolf from a trap.

Though the federal Endangered Species Act safeguarded wolves from overzealous state hunting and trapping laws, as the director of the USFWS pointed out, the ESA is “not an animal protection act.”

The right of an American species not to be hunted to extinction is a relatively new advancement. At present, it‘s about the only right extended to the nonhumans in this, the land of the free. Alas, the river of speciesism still runs deeper than the Potomac at spring breakup.

Founding father and second US president, John Adams, may, or may not, have believed that all men were created equal, but he clearly took a dim view of the wildlife native to our formerly pristine land. In 1756 he openly expressed his scorn for the world his ancestors had strived to transform: “Then, the whole continent was one continued dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men…Then our rivers flowed through gloomy deserts and offensive swamps.“

Unfortunately for any animal not blessed enough to be born human, our unalienable rights to life and liberty were specific initially only to white males, next, to all males and then to all human animals regardless of gender or sexual orientation but as yet do not extend to the nonhuman animals with whom we share this planet.

Our lawmakers have had a sad history of turning a blind eye to the most basic rights of those who differ from us primarily in that all four of their limbs are used for walking and they don‘t wax the hair off their backs. This seems a little biased when you consider that in terms of social skills, devotion to family and intellect relevant to survival animals, like wolves, are every bit our equals.

Why is this happening? So that “sportsmen” can claim all the “game” species for themselves. The return to full-scale wolf hunting gives today‘s anti-wolf bigots their chance to drive this misunderstood embodiment of wilderness back to the brink of oblivion.

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Portions of this post were excerpted from the book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

The Feeblest Rationale for Hunting Yet

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The Feeblest Rationale Yet

Dear Editor,

As I read the letter, “Not Fair to Hunters,” in last week’s MV News, I experienced a major WTF (ie: what the fuck?) moment at the line, “Even those who do not hunt should respect its place in the human psyche.” Of all the feeble rationalizations for hunting you hear these days, suggesting that it helped shape the human psyche in some respectable way is the feeblest yet!

Homo sapiens hasn’t proven to be a very kind-hearted species in terms of our treatment of others over the ages, and the act of slaying animals has done nothing to cultivate our moral evolution. To quote Sea Shepherd’s Captain Paul Watson from his foreword to my book, Exposing the Big Game, “The cruelty and destruction that humans have inflicted upon each other is surpassed only by the cruelty and destruction humans have inflicted upon the nonhuman citizens of this world.”

I devoted an entire chapter of my book to peering “Inside the Hunter’s Mind” and let me tell ya, it’s a dark and disturbing place down there.  Here are some of the startling things I discovered…

Hunters’ self-interests are consistently placed far above those of their animal victims, whom they depersonalize and view as objects rather than individuals. Reducing living entities to lifeless possessions and taking trophies of their body parts—without the slightest hint of guilt, remorse or other higher sentiment—is standard practice for the sport hunter…and the serial killer.

And like a serial killer, the sportsman keeps his malignant, murderous obsession concealed within the hollow confines of his psyche…until the next hunting season.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Occupy Wildlife!

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A new USFWS survey suggests the popularity of hunting has risen from 4% in 2006 to 6% in 2011. Many are in doubt that a growth in hunting participation is actually going on, and suspect that those numbers have been skewed to give the illusion that it’s a growing, rather than a dying sport. Even if a few more people have fallen prey to the lure of the blood-sporting way, 6% of the population is not a very high percentage of the country considering that hunters and their ilk interject themselves into every issue that involves wildlife, while the rest of us who don’t approve of wildlife butchery are barely represented.

Whether hunters make up 4% or 6% of the US population, we are still the 95% (give or take a single measly point). It’s high time we start an Occupy Wildlife movement and give the non-hunting majority—and the animals—a voice!

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Welcome Anti-hunters (No Nimrods Allowed)

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I see by the comments coming in lately that there are a lot of new faces showing up here on this blog. I’d like to extend you all a warm welcome. I say, I’d like to, but unfortunately I can’t—not all the new folks who’ve joined us lately are benevolent toward their fellow beings. What I can and will do is roll out the welcome mat for fellow wildlife watchers and animal rights advocates and welcome anti-hunters and non-hunters alike.

There are some people who are absolutely not welcome. I’m talking about the hunter and trapper trolls who somehow found themselves here and are now thinking: “What the hell is this site?”

Well, I’ll start by informing you what it is not: This is not a red-neck tavern with a “Welcome Hunters” sign out front. It’s not a message board or a chat room for people wanting to argue the supposed merits of animal exploitation or to defend the act of hunting or trapping in any way, shape or form. There are plenty of other sites available for that sort of thing.

For your sake, I urge you not to bother wasting your time posting your opinions in the comments section. This blog is moderated, and pro-hunting outbursts will not be tolerated or approved. Consider this fair warning—if you’re a hunter, sorry but your comments are going straight to the trash can. This is not a public forum for nimrods or other self-serving animal abusers to discuss the pros and cons of hunting.

Those who know right from wrong on this issue may appear a bit narrow minded, but the fact is there are no real pros to the matter, only cons, so there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time with your tired old PR drivel. We’ve heard all the rationalizations for killing so many times before. Any attempt to justify the murder of our fellow animals will hereby be jettisoned into cyberspace.

What you’ve stumbled upon is a haven for wildlife and wildlife advocates, a wildlife refuge of sorts, that’s posted “No Hunting,” as any true sanctuary should be. Just as a refuge is patrolled to keep hunters and poachers from harassing the wildlife, this blog site is monitored to keep hunter trolls from disturbing other people’s quiet enjoyment of the natural world. Those are the people whose unselfish comments are always welcome here.

Stop the Cycle of Violence

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If you’ve read my book you already know I’ve had more than my share of first-hand experiences with the gruesome evils of trapping—enough to make me want to take my phazer off “stun” and instantly vaporize the next trapper I see out of existence. Surely the vacuous lunatics who participate in that pastime aren’t worthy of this wonderful world. As a compassionate society we must stop them from causing further torment.

But there are many otherwise good people—understandably enraged by the demonic actions of hunters and trappers—who take it a step too far. They say they want animal abusers to endure as much terrible agony as their victims. Not only do these foul thoughts bring us down to their level, they perpetuate the cycle of violence we should be striving to end. I wouldn’t wish the kind of suffering I’ve witnessed trapped animals going through on anyone, deserving or otherwise.

Of course, I don’t expect folks to shed a tear if a hunter or trapper dies in the act of harming others. That is, as they say, just “nature’s way.” Maybe they were bucking for a Darwin Award and finally earned one.

Still, if you can’t think of one good reason not to wish some awful un-pleasantry on a hunter or trapper, consider this: is a sheep rancher justified in wanting to see a coyote suffer as much as the lamb she preyed on? It’s the same mentality, the same sort of rationalization used to validate cruelly trapping, shooting or poisoning coyotes.

“An eye for an eye” is an outdated holdover from a time when fornicators were turned into pillars of salt and gods were so malevolent as to drown every animal on Earth (except the lucky couples on the Ark, as the story goes) just to punish the human species. As Mahatma Gandhi saw it, “An eye for an eye makes everyone blind.”

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson