Perspective

Today's Letters: Killing defenseless wildlife is needless cruelty

Two ways to eat green Dec. 23   

I submit that Steven Rinella's piece is only another effort by the hunting community to legitimize the cruelty that is hunting.

Using typical hunterspeak, Rinella characterizes his activity as a "harvest" or "cull." To be precise, Rinella needs to call hunting what it really is: the needless killing of defenseless wildlife.

Animals killed by hunters routinely die lingering deaths. Being a skilled marksman is not a prerequisite for buying a hunting license (so much for "humane slaughter"). Wounding rates for hunting are typically high, especially from bow hunting. Animals have highly developed nervous systems and feel pain the same as humans. I have even heard hunters argue that animals feel no pain at all. Anyone with cats or dogs in their household knows otherwise.

Rinella also engages in the tired and deceptive notion that hunting can somehow be justified because hunters eat what they kill. The truth is that most hunters kill for "sport," which, by the way, is the only "sport" in which the loser dies.

Rinella is correct on one count. Deer overpopulation is a problem, but one created by man. As their habitat is turned into subdivisions and their natural predators have long since been killed off, there has been no natural population control. The hunter as ersatz predator typically wants the biggest and best specimen to hang on his wall and is not really interested in controlling populations, despite what wildlife agencies may espouse. Killing the biggest specimen is a violation of natural selection. In addition, state agencies have a vested interest in manipulating wildlife populations so that hunters will have more live targets to kill and the agencies will have more license money for their coffers. While hunting may temporarily reduce a given population, the opposite eventually occurs. Reduced pressure on food and habitat results in increased deer births.

Hunters are not stewards of the land, environmentalists or anything of the kind. What steward would intentionally poison the land with toxic lead shot, pollute the air with exhaust from an SUV or pickup, and kill its inhabitants? Rinella's piece is just another specious, self-aggrandizing attempt to defend what has no defense.

Durk Gescheidle, Palm Harbor

[Last modified December 29, 2007, 22:03:19]