I am sickened as I read the lead story on the front page of Sunday’s Tampa Bay Times. The page
is dominated by a photo of a man with a gun in the back of a pickup truck
hovering over the lifeless carcasses of two black bears. If there was any mercy
in this slaughter, these two bears never knew what hit them. A hunter from the
Tampa area said of his trophy, “"One shot and down it went."
Amazing how that works.
Unarmed animals incapable of defending themselves simply fall down dead when
they encounter another animal trained to shoot the weapon it is carrying. No
muss, no fuss.
My great aunt, the outspoken
Kansas suffragette, temperance supporter and segregation opponent, was fond of
saying, “People call hunting a sport. But there’s nothing sporting about shooting
down unarmed animals. Give the deer a gun and teach them how to shoot back. Now,
*that* would be a sport.”
By Monday, the official
total had risen to 295 including at least two cubs. Some of the bears were
lactating mothers which means that the cubs those mothers nursed may likely die
as well. The two day bear hunting season will ultimately prove to be a
veritable slaughter.
Hunting as a way of life… and death
While I have never been a
hunter, I grew up in a place where hunting was the norm. Every young boy was
trained to shoot a gun as quick as their daddy had time to take them out to the
woods to teach them.
Even so, I knew from the
beginning that I would never be a hunter. On my 12th birthday, my
Dad gave me the option of him buying me a gun or taking my friends and I to a
local swimming pool for my birthday party. I did not hesitate in choosing the
pool even as I knew it would break my Dad’s heart that his son would not be a
hunter.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t good
with a gun. In fact, I was. On one of the two days I ever went to the woods
with my dad and brother armed with a shotgun and a pistol, we had grown bored
from the lack of animals to shoot and my Dad decided that, given the coming
Christmas season, we could shoot down some mistletoe from the top of the tree
to take to our Mom. Both my Dad and my brother had shot and missed. I took the
pistol, eyed my target, aimed the gun and shot. The mistletoe came plummeting
down, first shot.
In all honesty, my deadly
accuracy scared me. An aim like that could be easily applied to any other
living being. I didn’t want to be an agent of death, regardless of whose, especially
when that death was avoidable and unnecessary.
I knew that my aversion to
killing was not shared by my classmates who, by the time they reached high
school, excitedly anticipated their weekends in the woods spent with lots of guns
and gut-rot cheapo beer. Though I never shared that excitement, I came to
accept its inevitability as each fall arrived.
But I never lost sight of
its deadly potential.
My junior year in high
school, a group of my classmates were out for their usual fall ritual
bloodletting and beer drinking. During a lull in the action, they had begun to
consume the copious quantities of beer they’d brought with them. One of them
decided to prop his shotgun up against a fallen tree trunk. The gun began to
slip in the wet clay beneath the log and when he grabbed the gun barrel to keep
it from falling, it discharged, blowing off the back of my classmate’s head.
By the time I graduated from
high school, I had come to a realization that hunting was a part of rural
culture that I would never understand but begrudgingly had come to accept.
Bernie Sanders is right on this point about guns: the use of guns in rural
areas like his home state of Vermont and the Sumter County of my youth is not
the same as the misuse of guns which have inappropriately and increasingly been
imposed upon the public square. One size will never fit all when it comes to
this question
.
Deadly Gross Mismanagement
It is less the actual
hunting of these bears than the reasons for its authorization that trouble me.
The impetus for the slaughter of black bears has come primarily from the
increasingly tense interactions between the residents of the exurbs steadily
encroaching on the remaining wildlife refuges not yet fallen to the developers’
bulldozers and the wildlife who once lived there. Animals pushed from their
native habitat are increasingly prone to return to now “developed” lands with
human animal residents to try to find food.
Called “nuisance” animals by
their human animal counterparts (one has to wonder what description the
wildlife would use to describe the newcomers who forced them from their
habitats), that description ironically points to the legal principle of “coming
to the nuisance.” That common law doctrine was historically used to estop law
suits against existing practices on adjoining properties when people
voluntarily came to that location aware of the practices.
When I was in junior high, a
family bought the large tract of cow pasture to the south of our place. At the
end of the dirt road which separated our properties was the home of another
neighbor who had for years raised a handful of pigs on the edge of his
property. The new neighbor had built a beautiful home along his property line –
right next to the pig pen.
In what my saintly mother, who
was decidedly not prone to say ugly things about anyone, called “the absolute
height of gall,” the new neighbor came to our existing neighbor and demanded he
remove the pig pen. While the new neighbor had no right to make such a demand,
the existing neighbor was kind enough to hear him out without erupting in
outrage. And within a short time, the pigs went away. Rather than get into a
protracted legal battle which he couldn’t afford, our pig farming neighbor
simply caved.
At a very basic level, the
human animals who have invaded the habitats of existing animals have no moral
ground upon which to see those pre-existing animals as nuisances, much less to
demand their removal when they return to find food. But this slaughter of
wildlife is but one example of a deadly competition for control playing out
between a single species of animal which has come to be dominant in the
biosphere and all other contenders which now are at the mercy of that
self-absorbed species. Perhaps the worst part of this open season on bears is
that it simply encourages more of the thoughtless development which gave rise
to the problem in the first place.
The programs which authorize
hunts such as we are seeing in Florida this weekend are euphemistically called
“wildlife management,” a poorly disguised attempt to legitimate what is clearly
a wanton slaughter of non-human animals. Yet there is no small amount of irony
in the specter of a human animal whose urban sprawl has given rise to this problem
in the first place presuming the need to manage the rest of the animal species.
Urban sprawl - and the multitude of problems that have stemmed from it - all
evidence an inability of the human animal to manage its own species in a
healthy manner.
Upon what basis would it
presume to manage the others?
Worshipping the Idol
of Anthropocentrism
The ursucide of Florida
occurs in a much broader context of interactions between the human animal and
the rest of a biosphere that has grown increasingly vulnerable to its assaults.
The effects of anthropogenic climate change have already begun to force major
numbers of animals from native habitats into more hospitable climate regions if
they actually exist.
But the response to climate
change is part of a much larger picture in which animal extinctions have far
surpassed their natural rates of occurrence. The Center for Biological
Diversity reports “Although
extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of
about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing
species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens
going extinct every day.”
While such extinctions often
occur off the radar of most human animals’ consciousness, far more high profile
examples of killing of endangered wildlife has recently filled the news. A
Minnesota dentist who illegally shot and killed a magnificent lion drew the
fury of horrified readers around the world when it was reported. Last week a
Texas hunter killed a black rhinoceros bull in a much more complicated
situation (the bull had proven lethally aggressive toward other calves of this
critically endangered species and the hunter provided $35,000 for the
conservation fund to protect the remaining rhinos) only to encounter an airline
who refused transport the head of the dead animal back to Texas.
The Texas hunter has sued Delta Airlines for that refusal charging it with
discrimination. The specter of a wealthy oil heir suing an airline which
refused to transport the carcass of a critically endangered species around the
world is not a terribly surprising example of the entitlement the 1% in America
have become accustomed to expecting. But to sue on the same legal basis as the
plaintiffs in the Brown v.The Board
case prosecuted their action against the Topeka School District is almost too
absurd for even this lawyer to imagine.
What is most troubling about
these high profile cases of animal slaughter in the context of a rapidly
shrinking fauna is what it signals to the rest of the world. The Chinese love
affair with an SUV has played a major role in clogging 50 lane Chinese freeways
and making the air in much of urban China unbreathable. But it arose in the
context of an American culture industry whose images of driving gas guzzling,
road hogging, atmosphere clogging vehicles have repeatedly preached to the rest
of the world, including the odd combination of free market fundamentalism and
authoritarian governance that is today’s China, that such were the marks of the good life.
What chance does the remaining animal population stand against a human population
who sees the good life in practices which inexorably cause extinctions?
The assumptions of a human
animal species that its desires are the only important considerations in the
world regardless of their impact on that world arise from a highly narcissistic
ideology called anthropocentrism. But the Hebrew prophets had a much better
word for it. They called such behaviors idolatry.
You Can’t Eat Money
The assault on the animal
kingdom by its human species is ultimately an exercise in self-destruction. We
are part of that kingdom but only part. But if the rest of the kingdom falters
and declines, so shall we.
We live in a consumerist
culture whose shallow values fuel addictive spirals of ever more consumption,
served by an entertainment industry whose products numb our senses and prompt
us to seek ever greater thrills. At heart we recognize the shallowness of our
lives and seek meaning in any manner we can. But there can never be enough
trophy animals on our walls to fill the gaping holes in our very souls.
In a 1972 collection of
essays entitled “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?”, Canadian filmmaker and
First Peoples spokesperson Alanis Obomsawin restated a Cree Indian proverb
which well sums up the crisis facing our relationship to the biosphere around
the world:
“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and
the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.”
Our greed threatens to
consume not only the other species of the biosphere, it ultimately threatens to
consume us.
This is the lesson we must
learn in Florida. Urban sprawl is deadly to the very natural world many of us
came to Florida to enjoy. Displaced animals are not nuisances, they are simply
hungry and homeless. Any nuisance they may pose arises in the context of a
myopic approach to development and a callous disregard for the natural realm. These
animals deserve our thoughtful consideration, not more of the deadly misuse of
our power.
If we human animals feel the
need to manage animal species, we need to begin by demonstrating our abilities
to manage our own. And we need to do so soon.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott
Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth
considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d
require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
