PUTNEY-The story being told is what I regard as coming from the entitled position on the sociopathic spectrum.
Deborah Lee Luskin, you say that you finally felt the tree, and your place in the forest. The awe and connection to nature, the voice from the universe. Really! No other part of nature has a gun.
But this is all about you. And your additional ability to dress it up with an old tale, green-washing, an anti-Bambi tirade, and self-serving facts and ethics.
You are doing deer a service by killing them? They eat twigs, bark, and grass.
Imagine their lives spent with no shelter, a thin fur coat in the worst winter weather, in a freezing rain that turns to ice covering everything they eat and stand, maybe pregnant, while the wind blows. What marvelous creatures to garner our respect and awe!
We have been here surrounded by our acres of lawn and woods since 1983, and never seen an emaciated deer stagger out of the forest. A deer you describe in these terms was probably sick. The "new" idea for humans to thin the herd is one for the hunting lobby.
So let's think about deer, and all the other animals you hunters and trappers (the worst of the worst that should be banned outright) regard as your just reward after baiting, hounding, scent and sound calling, etc.
Those lives belong to sentient beings that start with their mother's love and care. They have siblings and, later, friends and families. They have individual personalities and places where they like to eat and to frolic.
Then add this - as animals go, humans are an ugly lot, with our greed, self-righteous manifest destiny status, and, yes, with the way we look. As we treat animals worse than the slaves to whom we have done despicable things, there must be an element of envy for their independence and perfect beauty. To vanquish them is about your power and control in a radically unequal competition.
As an artist, I see killing these beautiful beings as Philistines at work. It should not be called a sport. We do not need to eat animals; it is healthier for us and this sacred planet - which humans are destroying in every way - to start weaning away from that.
Leave the unhunted coyotes, bears, and big cats to select the weaker animals. That is how nature has worked to produce the excellent machines for living that we can be awed by.
Getting back to the sociopathic spectrum: With Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, and others on the pathogenic end, and your kind, generous, and ethical friends on the empathic end, aren't the people who get a kick out of murdering animals well in on the cruel side of the middle?
Christopher Sproat
Putney
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