By
Paul Watson
Recently
a National Board Member for the Sierra Club
My
resignation from the Sierra Club received more letters of support for
condemning hunting than criticisms and this was to be expected
considering that more than 80% of Sierra Club members do not hunt.
Of
the few who were critical of my anti-hunting position, they reportedly
took offense to my remarks as being anti-hunting (of course they were)
and they insisted that hunters were a strong conservation lobby and thus
essential to protecting wildlife and wildlife habitats.
I
probably should have been more definitive of my position. Instead of
stating that I was anti-hunting or opposed to hunters, I should have
said that I am anti-killing and opposed to killers.
The
choice is really between endorsing the infliction of pain, suffering and
death or opposing the infliction of pain, suffering and death.
Pro-killers
will say that those people like me who are opposed to killing are
alienated urbanities, of the privileged class, and insensitive to the
traditional rationale that supports hunting.
That
argument does not work with me because I was raised as the eldest of
seven children by a single mother in a small fishing village in a rural
area of
Eastern Canada
. My father was abusive and he was a hunter.
I
have spent a large part of my life in third world nations and on the
ocean. I oppose the killing of wildlife not because I am alienated from
nature but because I happen to believe that you can’t love or respect
nature with a gun.
I
walked the trap lines in the Eastern bush as a child. I walked them to
free captive animals from leg hold traps and to destroy the traps. I
destroyed hundreds of these vicious contraptions between the ages of 11
and 18.
I
have seen the suffering. In
Kenya
I watched a mother elephant literally weep for the loss of her calf. In
Michigan
I witnessed a Canada goose sit for days without eating beside the body
of its mate who had been shot and not recovered. In
Alaska
I saw a Grizzly cub sitting confused beside the skinned body of its
mother who was killed only for her hide. In the
Yukon
, I followed a trail of blood for over a mile to discover an aerial
gut-shot wolf staring at me in fear and bewilderment.
What
I have observed in the wild is suffering. It was plainly evident and I
felt remorse for the arrogance of our species for justifying the taking
of lives for sport, for enjoyment, for fun, and for pleasure.
In
Zimbabwe
I spent time with big game hunters, some of whom reluctantly led rich
trophy hunters into the bush because they had lost their jobs as rangers
and President Mugabe had ruled that unless wildlife made money the
animals would be eliminated. These hunters described most of their
clients as slob hunters, arrogant and ignorant and expressed their shame
at being forced to participate in the murder business.
I
was amazed to discover that a Texan accountant had won a prize from the
Boone and Crocket Club for bagging a trophy whitetail deer and then he
was exposed when it was discovered that the rack of an animal stolen
from a taxidermist in Alberta had been surgically grafted onto a smaller
animal on a game farm in Mexico where they flushed it out from cover
into the sights of the “great hunters” rifle.
It
was John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club who first described
hunting as “the murder business.”
In
a few places in the world people hunt for survival. In the past, people
were forced to hunt for survival. The constituency the Sierra Club is
now courting through its killer outreach program are not people who have
a need to hunt for survival.
They
are people who spend more money on weaponry, travel and related expenses
than the value of the meat they obtain. It is not the meat they are
after but the thrill of the kill.
Dick
Cheney, when not shooting lawyers, describes how he loves to see the
ducks tumble from the sky. I’ve heard hunters describe how pulling the
trigger gives them an erection.
These
are men who slaughter for pleasure. I call them perverse death deviants
and I have no apologies for labeling them as such. Killing for pleasure
is a sickness, no different than child molestation or rape.
There
is no sport in killing an animal from a distance with a sophisticated
tool designed to inflict death. The name sportsman implies that there is
a fair contest. There is nothing fair about being ripped apart by high
powered bullets.
Hunters
target the biggest, the strongest and the best of the species they
pursue. This is behavior outside the laws of ecology. It is unnatural
predation and certainly cannot be condoned by credible conservationists.
Hunters
defend their perverse desire to extinguish life by saying it is
traditional. Unfortunately many barbaric practices are traditional.
However, modern day hunting bears little relation to so called
traditional hunting. Hunters today are more akin to those who eradicated
the bison and took only the tongues.
Hunters
were responsible for the extinction of the
Labrador
duck, the Passenger Pigeon, the Eastern Bison, the Plains Wolf and the
extirpation of the Grizzly from most of the lower 48 states. They were
not only killers they were involved in the act of specicide – the
complete eradication of entire species. This was not conservation.
Hunters
cite Theodore Roosevelt as a big game hunter who was also a
conservationist. This is true, he was both. He lived in a time when
killing for pleasure was accepted but it was also a time when racism was
accepted as normal and it was considered abnormal for women to have any
rights, especially the right to vote. Roosevelt did set aside land to
conserve much in the same way that the British aristocracy set aside
land as exclusive hunting preserves to keep out the lower classes.
The
Sierra Club is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach out to
invite killers to join the Club. The leadership of the Club believes
that the over 80% of Club members who don’t take pleasure from killing
must be tolerant of the less than 20% who do. They want to bring in more
killers into the Club.
There
is a big difference between hunting and killing. Photographers and film
makers can hunt wildlife. It actually takes more skill to hunt a
Mountain sheep with a camera than with a rifle. Any nimrod can pull a
trigger and send a high velocity bullet unexpectedly into living tissue
to shatter organs and induce shock. The photographer brings back
nobility, a creature caught in its natural habitat in harmony with the
world around it.
The
killer watches his victim tumble from the air or crash to the ground as
it chokes and gurgles on its own life blood. The photographer brings
back life. The hunter brings back death.
I
have been a hunter myself. I’ve never killed anything but I have
stalked and hunted human poachers. I have destroyed their ships, their
rifles, their nets, their longlines and their harpoons. I have snatched
clubs from the bloody hands of sealers and defended myself from their
attacks. My form of hunting is much fairer and gutsier than these
killers who prey upon their unsuspecting and innocent victims. I target
the guilty not the innocent.
Once
I trekked with Kenyan rangers across the plains of Tsavo on the track of
poachers. We followed their trail of elephant carcasses rotting on the
ground with only their tusks removed. We found the criminals. They fired
on us and killed one of our rangers. We did not kill them. We wounded
two and arrested seven. They were armed with AK-47 rifles and our
rangers were armed with British Enfield 303’s. We were up against a
superior foe and we beat them. It was not sport. It was not fun. It was
dangerous and necessary work and the objective was to save lives, not to
extinguish lives.
That
is the only kind of hunting that makes sense today in a world with a
human population approaching seven billion. If every American exercised
their “right” to kill, the ducks, geese, quail, elk, deer and other
creatures would disappear quite quickly. There are simply to many of us
and not very many of them.
It
can hardly be an egalitarian sport if only a minority of citizens can
realistically participate. Instead of encouraging hunting, groups like
the Sierra Club should be discouraging the number of hunters. The nation
and the world needs fewer killers of wildlife – not more.
In
Europe
over a hundred million songbirds are gunned down every year. Elephant
populations have been reduced by 70% in
East Africa
since I worked on poaching patrols there in 1978. World fisheries are in
a state of collapse. Wildlife is getter scarcer and there is more need
now than ever for protection.
Why
can’t we protect wetlands simply because wetlands need to be
protected? Why is there this demand that killers are needed to help
protect wetlands simply because they want to slaughter ducks?
Canada
geese mate for life. Shouldn’t it bother us that we shatter tens of
thousands of these relationships every year? Why should we tolerate the
accumulation of lead and steel shot in the marshes and estuaries? Why
should we tolerate the legal murder of human beings that we label as
hunting accidents, especially when the victim is a non-killer, perhaps a
child some nimrod has mistaken for a deer.
The
son of Sigmund Freud was walking on his own property in
Quebec
when a hunter shot and killed him. The killer was found not guilty
because the death was ruled an “accident”.
When
a stranger can kill you on your own land and get away with it, it
demonstrates that our tolerance for this legal killing has gone over the
top of acceptability.
One
killer wrote me to say that my “radical anti-hunting” ideas were
unacceptable for a member of the Board of the Sierra Club. When did
opposition to killing, to the taking of life, to the extinguishment of a
living creature, to the wasting of a sentient being become a radical
idea?
Sometimes
I think we live in such a bizarre world where advocates for life are
considered radical and proponents of death are considered normal, where
violence is considered acceptable and non-violence is dismissed as
unpatriotic or cowardly.
Few
killers question the morality of their actions. Once you have reached a
stage where you can inflict cruelty and death, thoughts of morality,
empathy and respect have long since vanished.
For
if a killer of a deer could feel the pain and anguish of his victim or
see the fawn starve because of a mother that did not return they would
have little appetite for the meat.
Humans
who have crossed the line into dealing death and inflicting misery have
become alienated from the wonderment of life and no longer see or
appreciate the magic of being alive.
Life
is to be cherished, protected, defended and championed, not to be
wantonly and cruelly destroyed, and certainly not for so frail an excuse
as pleasure or sport.
This
essay may be freely distrbuted and published.
