WHY I QUIT HUNTING
Published by cyrano2 at 8:30 pm under Animal Liberation, Cruel Idiots,
Empathy Deficient, Exploitation, Moral Cowardice, Moral Rot, Speciesism
BY WAY OF PREFACE TO A PERSONAL STORY
Man is a creature of astoni****ng contradictions and enormous moral range.
The same species that produces fools, knaves, cowards, a massive number
of mediocrities, and assorted monsters of depravity, also gives us
geniuses,
saints, and heroes of exemplary virtue. The spread of behavior is so vast
as
to be almost incomprehensible. But maybe the most interesting thing about
humans is their capacity to travel from one point of the moral spectrum to
another, from evil to good, and from good to indifference and often tacit
acceptance of evil.
Modern-day hunters and people who callously use animals for vanity and
or "recreation" (remember Michael Vick) fall into an especially
troublesome
category. In the vast majority of cases the person in question is simply a
victim of unexamined assumptions and cultural traditions, and a pitiful
lack
of empathetic imagination, a total failure of compassion. Such individuals
commit disgusting acts, but the baffling thing about the horrors of this
world, what some call the sheer "banality of evil", is that committing an
evil
act does not per se signify the person is utterly evil. People are often
not
only contradictory in their behavior, they also change their ways and
undergo
redemption. I'm not a conventionally religious person, at all, but the
idea of
redemption - in a secular, not Catholic form - I find powerful and
touching in the extreme. For by showing that humans are indeed capable of
understanding their wrongful deeds, that, despite all the muck that
surrounds
us, decency manages to survive somehow, and that in consequence they
indeed aspire to live in peace with their conscience, because, if nothing
else
bad actions do in fact bother them, deny them rest, redemption underscores
the possibility of a better world grounded in real peace and justice for
everyone, none the least for the most exploited and brutalized creatures
on
this earth, the animals.
The personal document I reproduce below has special significance for me
because it is about redemption, a hunter's redemption. Although I have
always been familiar with weapons of various types, I never took to the
"pleasures" of shooting animals, "live targets." I never could see the
"s****t"
in it at all. And never will. Thus the hunter's mind, a person who sees
absolutely nothing wrong in killing a beautiful, innocent, living
breathing
creature for his own personal pleasure, or some other frivolous reason or
pretext (and I should tell you that after more than three decades in the
animal defense movement I've heard just about all the pro-hunting
arguments
ever crafted by this fraternity) remains a baffling mystery. I was
therefore
immensely excited when, back in 1986, when I served as editor at large for
The Animals' Agenda, the first independent US animal rights publication,
I got this unsolicited testimony from Dallas Gragg, a former hunter.
Dallas's words are effortlessly eloquent and they remain true to this day.
The strong personal conscience and integrity that illuminated his journey
of moral self-discovery was there all along, only momentarily suppressed
by the pressures of conventionality and cultural norms. I am therefore
confident you'll find his testimony as moving as when I first read it more
than 20 years ago. The truths he speaks about can never be extinguished.
For they define what the transformation potential of human beings is all
about. I am happy to be able to share Dallas's story with our Cyrano
audience. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for coming forward.
-Patrice Greanville, The Greanville Journal
=============================================
WHY I QUIT HUNTING
BY ROY DALLAS GRAGG |
[Original dateline: Animals' Agenda, November 1986]*
I WAS BORN in the mountains of North Carolina near Grandfather Mountain
and Mt. Mitchell. Hunting, killing and butchering animals was a way of
life for
the mountain people. I killed my first hog at age eight. I had expected
the
animal to fall as if by magic when I squeezed the trigger of my
grandfather's old
..22 caliber rifle. I was both surprised and alarmed when the animal
screamed
with pain and agony. "More carefully," my uncle said, "You have to hit him
in
the head." When the rifle cracked the second time, the animal fell dead.
I couldn't sleep that night - I could still hear the animal's screams. The
adults
laughed the next day when I told them it just didn't seem right to shoot
an
animal when he was locked helplessly in a pen.
I dreaded October each year-that was the month when the hogs and steers
were
killed and butchered. Early in the morning barrels of water were heated
over
roaring fires to scald the animals so that their hair could be scraped
off. I got
a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when a butcher knife slashed the
hog's
throat and the blood ran across the ground as the pitiful animal convulsed
and
kicked. The air smelled of death, especially when the hogs were gutted. I
noticed that the horse, a huge Clydesdale mare named Bell, would sniff the
air,
and with big eyes run away. She too smelled the death. I always stayed
outside
whenever possible because the stench of lard being boiled on the woodstove
was unbearable.
However, it was always my job to turn the handle of the hand-operated
sausage
machine. Spring brought another dreaded time, when the man came to
castrate
the pigs and dehorn the cattle. I would hold my ears to shut out the sound
of
their agonized screams. "Don't be a sissy-you'll get used to it," I was
told, but
I never did.
Sundays usually brought another unpleasant task: catching a chicken and
"wringing" its neck. The sight of the unfortunate creatures' bodies
jumping
high in the air with a broken neck is still fresh in my mind, even though
it was
over thirty years ago.
To make matters worse, the butchered birds and animals had often been
pets.
I had a pet chicken named Red. I trained Red, a big red hen, to sit
patiently on
a fence post or other object for hours until I set her down. I also had a
pet
turkey named Fred. As is the fate of most turkeys, Fred ended up on the
Thanksgiving table. The crowd roared with laughter when I said, "I'm not
thankful. Fred was my friend and I'm not going to eat him." My cousins
taunted me until I finally ate a small piece of breast, but I felt like a
cannibal.
I rather enjoyed hunting because I didn't have to butcher the birds and
animals.
By the time I was fourteen I was a "crack shot". I never missed. Squirrel
hunting was my favorite because the elusive gray squirrels were hard to
hit.
One day I grazed a big gray squirrel and he fell right in front of my dog
Rex.
The squirrel was putting up a furious battle against the dog who was many
times its size. I sat down and thought for awhile. I couldn't help but
admire
the little animal. He had wanted to live!
The mountain people often shot the red squirrels or "boomers" for shooting
practice. The red squirrels were not good to eat so they were thrown away.
But that didn't sit right with me either. I doubted that God made his
boomers
just to shoot at.
One morning, as I sat on top of a steep hill waiting for the sun to come
up and
the game to start moving about, I noticed many small oak trees on the
hill.
Acorns are heavy, especially this variety. They were as big as chestnuts
and
probably weighed several ounces. I hadn't seen this particular variety
before.
I strolled down the hill and crossed a small valley to another hill and
found the
parent tree, a huge oak about four feet in diameter. I was puzzled. How
did the
acorns travel across a valley to another hill? The wind didn't blow them,
that
was for sure, and floodwaters don't run uphill. I saw something move out
of
the corner of my eye. It was a gray squirrel leaping from a huge oak
heading
across the valley. I dropped the squirrel with a single shot. Imagine my
surprise
when I picked up the squirrel and he had one of those huge acorns lodged
in
his mouth! I had been shooting the planters of the forests! On the way
home
I said to myself, "So that's why God made squirrels."
A few years later, I joined the army and became qualified as an expert
rifleman.
"I have never seen anyone shoot like that," I overheard the sergeant tell
the
lieutenant.
"He dropped 16 men (targets) in less than 20 seconds!" Later the
lieutenant
said to me "You could do that in Vietnam, too. The slant-eyes are just
bigger
game." But I didn't make it to Vietnam. An ulcer got me a medical
discharge
and I returned home to the mountains.
I still hunted some but I thought about the squirrels. If they were
nature's
planters, what were the other animals' jobs? Later I noticed holly bushes
in
sheltered mountain valleys, over 20 miles from their natural growing
range.
It was quite obvious that birds had carried the seeds this great distance.
By the time I was thirty I had quit hunting entirely and began studying
the birds
and animals. I read books on ecology and the environment. And I returned
to
the forests - this time with a camera instead of a gun. I watched the
squirrels
carefully. They would always follow the same path through the trees,
swinging
like trapeze artists. Occasionally I would see a flying squirrel gliding
silently
through the trees or a ruffled grouse blasting away like a rocket.
I marked the spots where the nuts carried by squirrels fell and returned
in the
spring to find small trees growing in those areas. I also observed the
"worthless"
red squirrels burying nuts. It occurred to me that nut-bearing trees,
oaks,
hickories, walnuts, chestnuts and many, many others all depended on the
little
animals to trans****t their seed throughout the forests.
It should be obvious to any thinking person that nature is a powerful but
delicate
force. Each living thing on the planet is striving for survival in one way
or another,
and striving to keep its kind from becoming extinct. Various species of
plants,
birds and animals have survived earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires,
floods
and many other kinds of natural catastrophes only to fall victim to
uncaring humans.
Hunters are directly responsible - to name a few - for the extinction of
the
passenger pigeon as well as many kinds of island-dwelling birds. The
buffalo
very nearly became extinct after hunters [retained by commercial
interests] went
after them largely to wipe out the Indians' [main] food supply. Starve'em
to
submission.
This strategy left more than 50 million of the great creatures on the
plains to
decay in the sun. Hunters have brought the mountain lion, the grizzly
bear, the
whooping crane, and even the symbol of our nation, the bald eagle, to the
brink of extinction.
I began studying hunters from "the other side of the fence:' When working
with
hunters I would ask their opinions of hunting. One hunter's reply was,
"God
made animals for me to eat - what else are they good for?" Another said,
"It makes me forget my troubles to hunt and fish." I thought long and hard
about
his statement. Humans vent their stress and their frustrations from daily
life on
innocent wildlife. Hunting is a one-sided game with only one winner -
human
beings. This is why hunters refer to birds and animals as "game". When the
hunter has hunted down and killed an animal, he has "won" the game. More
often
than not, the creature is killed for pleasure instead of for food. A
certain sadistic
pleasure is derived by killing another creature. When a human kills an
animal the
act fuels his ego: he has mastered the creature by taking its life.
Why else would a trophy hunter spend thousands of dollars, hike through
steaming
s****- and insect-infested swamps or climb steep cliffs to kill a
magnificent member
of another species? Why else would he cut off the head of his victim and
leave the
body to rot? Why else would he take the head to a taxidermist and mount it
over his
fireplace? He has dominated and killed the "beast", and therefore hangs
its head up
for all the world to see that he is the mighty and fearless hunter. It is
nothing but fuel
for the insecure ego of small men.
The hunter, with the scent of death in his nostrils, has little respect
for his neighbor
who enjoys seeing the creatures on his property alive. "No hunting" and
"No
trespassing" signs are torn down or shot full of holes. A hunting license
is a permit
to kill indiscriminately. Our government sells out our wildlife for the
price of a
hunting license. Soon after becoming an anti-hunting advocate, I found my
tame
mallard ducks shot and floating on their pond. They too had enjoyed living
and I
enjoyed them. But some pervert found pleasure in their death. Once I
observed
hunters exterminating a covey of Bob White quail. Their cheerful calls can
no
longer be heard around the small mountain community where I grew up as a
child.
TRADITION is perhaps the worst enemy of the animals: even our holidays
call
for the killing of birds and animals. These barbaric traditions, including
hunting,
rodeos and other cruel s****ts, are taught to children and thus passed down
from
generation to generation. Only a little more than a century ago blacks
were
considered to be animals and were treated as such. Similarly. during the
second
World War, Jews were considered to be subhuman by the Nazis, or perhaps
even
subanimal, and were killed by the millions.
Even today we abuse our fellow humans through boxing, wrestling and other
cruel
s****ts. How can the perpetrators of cruelty among us be expected to
respect
animals when they do not even respect humans? Before we can understand
animal
abuse we must understand ourselves. Humanity lives not by reality but by
habits -
often anchored in selfishness and staggering ignorance. It is this aspect
of human
nature we must work against.
If my story can, in some small way, influence the traditional way of
thinking and
the ignorant beliefs about our fellow creatures, I would be greatly
pleased. This
story is to aid our fellow creatures who have long suffered at the hands
of
mankind. May they someday live in peace, without suffering and fear.
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