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

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Nov 22, 2007 4:55 PM
Subject: 1. COLUMN/ One Country’s Companion, Another’s Cuisine

1. COLUMN: One Country’s Companion Is Another’s Cuisine
PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST AS WRITTEN

For Thanksgiving, turn on the light inside someone else…
Share this column widely.

ACTION FOR ANIMALS, related to this column, emailed separately:
2. ACTION/ One Country’s Companion Is Another’s Cuisine
If your email provider censored part #2, we’ll try to send it again.
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*****************************

One Country’s Companion Is Another’s Cuisine
By Brenda Shoss, 11/22/07, www.KinshipCircle.org

Kinship Circle’s column runs in The Healthy Planet. Ms. Shoss has also contributed to The Animals Voice, Satya Magazine, VegNews, and other publications. KC Columns: www.kinshipcircle.org/columns_articles/

Red rivulets flow past a cage where he and others huddle in the airless heat. Hands abruptly tug him through metal slats. They bash his head with a pipe and shove an electric prod against him. He is a carcass, but awake, dunked in boiling water and blowtorched. Finally, everything goes black.

Elsewhere, an animal stiffens under the stomp of muddy boots. Hands drag him down a corridor and flip him over a four-foot ledge. A chain is looped around his neck and clipped to a forklift. Suddenly the ground goes away. Up, up, up. His legs fumble for an absent bottom. He panics beneath the rigid clamp at his neck. After four, five or more minutes, all breath leaves his body.

Their fear and pain are equal. But the first is a dog, the second a pig — and herein lies our cultural divide. Empathy for the dog does not extend to empathy for the pig.

(more…)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] brick.net
Date: Jun 24, 2007 1:39 AM
Subject: Animals ­ Unseen Collateral Damage

RELIEF GLOBAL / KINSHIP CIRCLE ANIMAL DISASTER RELIEF LIST

KINSHIP CIRCLE COLUMN, 6/24/07
PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST

Columns & Articles: www.kinshipcircle.org/columns_articles/

Animals - War’s Unseen Collateral Damage
By Brenda Shoss, 6/24/07, www.KinshipCircle.org

Kinship Circle’s column runs in The Healthy Planet. Ms. Shoss is also a contributing writer for The Animals Voice, Satya Magazine, VegNews, and other publications. To reprint this column, please request author permission at info [at] kinshipcircle.org

LEFT PHOTO: 8/5/06, network.bestfriends.org/middleeast/news/6547.html
– BETA rescued this little kitten, Louli, from the war zone.

RIGHT PHOTO: 6/4/07, from BETA Team, listmaster [at] betabeirut.com — Car bombs and hand grenades went off in Beirut. The first bomb exploded very close to one of our cat shelters in Ashrafieh area…

War devastates. We grieve for soldiers lost and the involuntary destruction of civilian life. But headlines rarely publicize war’s other collateral damage.

Animals, crimeless and naive, dodge mortars and armored combat vehicles. Their lives explode in a flurry of desertion, starvation, injury and death.

A month into last summer’s Israeli-Hezbollah war, bombs rain over Beirut’s southern suburbs. Israel’s military hopes to defuse Hezbollah’s command post, so Lebanese officials can assert autonomy along the border. Meanwhile, Hezbollah launches rocket strikes inside Haifa and northern Israel.

Helena Hesayne, a Beirut born architect, has little patience for the politics behind battle. Her mission is clear: To rescue animals abandoned in Lebanon’s exodus of one million people. In late July 2006, Hesayne and three others from Beirut For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (BETA) navigate smoldering rubble in a small convertible. Israeli soldiers eye their car full of dog and cat food.

Hesayne displays BETA’s accreditation papers. She has no fear, only stark resolve to retrieve four cats and one puppy seen locked inside a pet shop. “These animals are banging against the glass door, trying to get out. They are without food and water. I don’t know how long,” Hesayne recounts.

The women persuade another storeowner to unlock the pet shop for them. They are without crates, so they ferry animals toward their car under a downpour of bombs. “The entire time, this tiny puppy just licks our faces. It is the most amazing thing,” Hesayne says.

(more…)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 11, 2007 2:54 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times, “My Dog Days” - 6/11/07

The Monday, June 10, New York Times has an op-ed headed “My Dog Days” by novelist Arthur Phillips, which will warm the heart of all who have fallen in love with dogs. It opens:

“My little guy is growing up fast. He’s toilet-trained, he goes uncomplainingly to sleep and he no longer chews on his playmates’ faces until they bleed. He is 8 months old, and I know, years from now, that I will always remember this summer as the time he and I fell in love.

“Between this summer and next, this latest beagle — the third of my adult life — will age from zero to 1 (or zero to 7), on a fast track to reduce me to mourning sometime in my early 50s.”

I will not attempt to summarize it, as it so warmly written I could not do it justice. I urge you to go to www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10phillips.html and enjoy it in full. The more hits the article gets the better, so that the Times learns how much its readers enjoy animal friendly pieces. Please also send appreciative letters to the editor. As animal advocates, however, it is our job also to remind readers that equally beloved and memorable companions come from shelters. Because beagles are the focus of the piece, some people may also wish to write about the horrifying fate of many beagles in our nation’s laboratories.

(more…)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 5, 2007 1:19 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: People Magazine on Dog Discrimination, against big black dogs 6/11/07 edition

The current, June 11, edition of People Magazine, has a great story by Jill Smolowe headed, “Dog Discrimination?” and sub-headed, “When it comes to finding owners, big black pooches often face a tougher time than canines of other colors. Tamara Delany hopes to change that.” (Pg 93.)

It focuses on Delany’s attempts to find a home for a dog known in the rescue world as a BBD: a big black dog. We learn that such dogs have “two strikes,” being over 50lbs and black. An animal shelter worker quoted says, “The black dog is definitely more at risk of going to death row than a yellow or tan dog.”

We read:

“Delany, 43, has made it her mission to champion BBDs. A lifelong animal lover who at age 3 convinced her father to stop hunting, she first stumbled on the grim BBD phenomenon in 2003….”

She decided “These dogs need a Web site.’” It is www.blackpearldogs.com/

(more…)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 3, 2007 8:51 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times book reviews on pet grief and Doris Day’s animal rights - 6/3/07

The Sunday, June 3, New York Times Book Review has two reviews of interest to animal advocates. Critically acclaimed indie musician and animal rights activist Nellie McKay has written a review of a Doris Day biography and has focused on Day’s animal advocacy. The Book Review section also includes a review of “Dog Years, a Memoir” by Mark Doty, in which he explores his grief at the loss of his pets.

McKay’s article on Tom Santopietro’s “Considering Doris Day” is headed “Eternal Sunshine.” (p 50)

McKay discusses the Doris Day phenomena, then writes:

“Her pictures feature meat diets, carriage rides, careers in the cattle industry; they depict chicken-truck accidents as hilarious. In ‘Do Not Disturb,’ she saves a fox but sports a fur. Day is an inexhaustible animal advocate today, but these plotlines dismay because, as Tom Santopietro notes in ‘Considering Doris Day,’ ’she functioned as a role model through whom thousands of women worldwide lived vicariously.’ Day herself has mentioned projects she refused or changes she insisted on: she declined the role of Mrs. Robinson in ‘The Graduate’ (finding it exploitative) and had vulgarities removed from ‘Lover Come Back.’ She demanded proper care and feeding of the animals involved in the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ which was shot partly in Morocco.

“What Day refuses to tolerate is relevant because while her performances were a product of their era, sales of her albums seem to double or triple with each passing year, and DVDs of her movies are increasingly popular. She may not have pursued a political image, but her effect is more intimate, and more powerful, than that of many politicians. A testament to this power is that the organizations founded in her name have attracted more than 180,000 members, continuing to draw attention to the issue of animal rights, which has been called the most progressive cause of our time.

(more…)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 26, 2006 5:54 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times op-ed on pigeon appreciation 6/26/06

The Monday, June 26 New York Times includes a lovely op-ed by Andrew Blechman about pigeons. It is headed “Pigeon English.” (Pg A19.)

Blechman refers to London’s attempt to rid Trafalgar Square of pigeons, and, in New York, to poisoning, torture, and “the weekly poaching of thousands of pigeons, which are then sold to Pennsylvania gun clubs for use as live target practice.”

He writes:

“While most birds in the United States and abroad are protected by a series of federal laws and international treaties — the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act, for instance — pigeons have fallen through the avian safety net. While hummingbirds, piping plovers, the spotted owl and even New York City’s famous red-tailed hawk known as Pale Male are afforded stringent protections and favorable news media attention, it is open season on one of mankind’s most loyal and gentle friends, the pigeon.”

(more…)