Hunting is not “fun” or “enjoyable“, nor is it a “sport”;

If hunting was just about honing your shooting skills - challenging yourself, your aim, steadiness and sight - and hitting a target (stationary or not), then you could shoot at non-sentient targets - pieces of paper, bottles, clay discs.

If hunting was just about the joy of tracking, finding and surprising an animal in its natural habitat, you could shoot your targets with a camera.

But it’s not, so you don’t.

Hunting is about asserting your power over the less powerful, about dominating “others”, about getting your rocks off through sadism, in a legally and culturally sanctioned way.

It’s about taking your lack of power out on creatures less powerful than yourself. What better way to relax at the end of a long workweek than to gun down unsuspecting woodland creatures, all the while pushing thoughts of the abuses inflicted on you by the evil megatheocorporatocracy to the back of your mind.

Hunting isn’t about “having a good time”; it’s about exerting control when you might otherwise have none (or less so) at the expense of others. It’s about lashing out at those with less voice than your own, much like so many forms of human-on-human violence that we abhor today.

But Hillary, you’re right when you say that hunting is “part of culture…part of a way of life.”

Spousal abuse, child abuse, hate crimes against racial, ethnic, and sexual/gender minorities; all used to be “part of [our] culture…part of [the American] way of life”, yet time has proven(or perhaps more accurately, is proving) them barbaric, inhumane, unacceptable.

Like these, hunting will one day be seen as the patriarchal pathology it is.

That is all.

(Crossposted on.)

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Tagged: hunting hillary clinton 2008 elections guns parallel oppressions the patriarchy animals animal rights animal welfare