I found the following letter on the blog, www.thetruthaboutguns.com/, which just goes to show there is no stupidity so great that someone won’t try to imitate it: [The numerals in brackets correspond to my notes and reactions below.]
November 13, 2012 Joseph DiDomizio President and CEO Hudson Group
Dear Mr. DiDomizio,
On behalf of PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] and our more than 3 million members and supporters, I am writing to ask you to keep hunting magazines sold at your stores out of the reach and view of minors by displaying them alongside adult publications such as Playboy and Penthouse. We also urge you to refuse to sell these magazines to anyone under 18 years of age. Hunting magazines present killing as fun and exciting and encourage violent behavior in young people . . .[1]
These publications recklessly promote killing without explaining the devastating consequences.[2] The stress that hunted animals suffer from being pursued compromises their natural feeding habits, making it hard for them to store the fat and energy that they need to survive the winter.[3] Hunting also disrupts migration and hibernation patterns.[4] For animals like wolves, who mate for life and live in close-knit family units, hunting can devastate not only entire families but entire communities.[5] And many animals who are shot with a bullet or an arrow flee injured—only to die slow, agonizing deaths from blood loss, shock, starvation, gangrene, or attacks by predators.[6]
Like other forms of casual or thrill violence, hunting spawns a dangerous desensitization to the suffering of others.[7] According to published reports, many of the young people who have opened fire on their schoolmates—including 16-year-old Andrew Golden who, along with an accomplice, killed five people at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., and 17-year-old T.J. Lane, who killed three people at Chardon High School in Cleveland earlier this year, had first expressed their bloodlust by hunting animals.[8] Not every hunter will kill a human, of course, but in this era of escalating violence, it is irresponsible and downright dangerous to allow kids access to magazines that promote killing for “fun.”[9]
Your British counterpart, W.H. Smith, has already implemented an age restriction on the sale of hunting magazines, and we urge you to follow suit.[10] Please protect animals[11] and impressionable children by keeping hunting magazines out of young people’s reach and sight—just as you would with pornography.[12] Thank you. I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely, Tracy Reiman Executive Vice President PETA
[1] Anyone of any age who regards “killing as fun” is already, by definition, dangerously sociopathic or psychopathic or both, and devoid of either empathy or ethics. “Hunting,” on the other hand, is fun and is the activity portrayed as fun in hunting magazines. And hunting is, as Dr. Erich Fromm (social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and behavioral scientist) points out, a fusion of pleasure and ethics: “In the act of hunting, a man becomes, however briefly, part of nature again. He returns to the natural state, becomes one with the animal, and is freed from the burden of his existential split; to be part of nature and to transcend it by virtue of his consciousness. In stalking the animal he and the animal become equals…”
[2] Again, hunting magazines celebrate hunting, not killing. To quote the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset: “When one is hunting, the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters the lungs, the rocks acquire a more expressive physiognomy, and the vegetation becomes loaded with meaning. But all this is due to the fact that the hunter, while he advances or waits crouching, feels tied through the earth to the animal he pursues, whether the animal is in view, hidden, or absent…”
[3] On the contrary, prey animals have evolved to deal efficiently and effectively with being pursued, because that is, by definition, their natural state, and it has no effect on their ability to store fat and energy. In fact, an absence of natural stress by predation can be devastating to individual animals, entire species, and vast areas of critical ecosystems. You need look no further than the effects of over-population among whitetail deer in the east and Midwest for examples of what an absence of predators can do. Dr. James Swan (environmental psychologist, psychotherapist, and professor of socio-cultural anthropology) has pointed out that more deer are killed every year by automobiles than even existed in this country at the turn of the century; that more deer are killed every year by automobiles than are killed by hunters; and that over-population among mammalian and avian species has contributed to the spread of Lyme disease, bubonic plague, rabies, avian cholera, botulism, and tuberculosis, to say nothing of the spread of various species specific diseases. In Missouri, as I write this, deer herds are in the throes of a double infestation of both Blue Tongue and Chronic Wasting Disease. Unlike a bullet or an arrow, neither of those are quick or easy deaths. If you have any doubts about what overpopulation can do to an ecosystem, go on-line and look up aerial photographs of the devastation created to the tundra by snow geese around Churchill in Manitoba, Canada.
[4] Loss of habitat has an extraordinary and devastating effect on migration, but hunting has virtually zero effect on the migration of any species, avian or mammalian. As for hibernation patterns, since hunting seasons and limitations (originally suggested, promoted, and encouraged in this country by hunters) forbid the taking of animals during critical parts of their annual life cycle, I have no idea what nonsense PETA is spouting here.
[5] Hunting for wolves in North America is strictly controlled and monitored and is used primarily as a control mechanism for nuisance animals. In Alaska and Canada, where sport hunting of wolves is allowed, the “devastation” of “families and entire communities” has been sooooo severe that the population has expanded greatly in both countries. In Alaska, year before last, there was the first documented case of a human (a school teacher out jogging near a town) killed by a wolf pack in North America in recorded history, an example of what can happen when hunting is restricted and wolves or other predators lose their fear of humans.
[6] All states have very strict laws requiring the hunter to make every conceivable effort to recover wounded game, and many states have a law stating that a wounded and lost animal fills the hunter’s tag just as if he had recovered the animal. It is why Ted Nugent had to plead guilty to poaching in Alaska. And remember, these laws—all hunting laws and regulations—were originally suggested and encouraged by hunters. In America, hunters were the ones who came up with—and got passed—the concept of a tax (the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1939) on any kind of hunting or fishing gear, a tax that has raised nearly four billion dollars earmarked exclusively for wildlife habitat and management research. As Dr. Swan has pointed out: “Since the days of Kublai Khan, hunters have placed certain restrictions on themselves, such as seasons, limits, and methods.” Recovery is one of those restrictions.
[7] Wrong again, PETA. Hunting, in fact, spawns a healthy understanding of nature and the natural cycles of life and death. James Swan again: “Learning about the reality of the food chain, that life feeds on other life, through first-hand experience, as in hunting, commonly leads hunters to develop a reverence for nature that leads them to perform acts of conservation.” And Ortega y Gasset again: “Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery, and thereby contains something of a religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of nature.”
[8] & [9] Oh, please. Not even PETA could pass that one off without a caveat [9]. Dr. Melvin Konner, Emory University professor of psychiatry and anthropology, conducted a seven year study of the biological origins of human behavior that was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and which resulted in an award-winning book, The Tangled Wing, in which Konner concluded, “…there is little or no evidence, physiological or behavioral, to suggest that predatory aggression has much in common with intraspecies aggression.” In other words, to quote Dr. Swan again: “…ethical hunting is not associated with psychopathology or violence…”
[10] And if W. H. Smith jumped off a cliff…
[11] By all means, let us protect wildlife by leaving the management decisions about their welfare to Fish and Game scientists hired to do that very thing, and stop making nonsensical emotional appeals based on a complete disconnect from anything even approaching reality. Apart from the almost four billion dollars raised by the Pittman-Robertson Act, hunting and fishing licenses in America contribute roughly twenty percent of the revenues that keep state fish and game agencies solvent to protect the animals both hunters and non-hunters enjoy seeing. If PETA really wanted to do something effective to help wildlife, they would encourages their members to buy hunting and fishing licenses because that money is earmarked for fish and game. On a broader scale, to take Africa as another example, Safari Club International, a hunting organization, has repeatedly shown that the hunting of a species transforms that species, in the eyes of local people, from a nuisance to be exterminated into a source of revenue to be preserved and protected. Beyond that, just the presence of hunters discourages poachers from decimating herds of wildlife.
[12] Pornography. As Associate Justice Potter Stewart famously observed, “Hard core pornography is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.” Tracy Reiman’s moronic letter qualifies as a good example.
