More Carrying On

No, I am not a vegan.  My gripe against meat is cholesterol, not the premature termination of the prior user.   I have nothing against eating domesticated animals.  In a very real sense the rancher creates them for the purpose.  We see that when the price falls.  The numbers of cattle and poultry decline because the market for them has declined.  

I grew up on a chicken ranch and I understand the process.  For that matter, knowing them intimately, I will dropkick a chicken as far as possible at every opportunity.  They are hateful little bastards.  I am glad to eat chicken because it means one of them was offed for my dining pleasure.  I knew cows too.  They are good-natured creatures but so stupid that the difference between a live cow and a dead one is considerably less than one would imagine.  With animals produced through animal husbandry, the "killing them to eat" claim is not a transparent lie, it is a reasonable market choice by the producer and a reasonable nutritional choice by the consumer.

Wild animals are quite different.  They are there for their own purposes, not because Old MacDonald bred them on his farm  (nowadays Old MacDonald Farms, Inc.).  They come into being independent of human purposes.  Their purposes in life are to eat, to enjoy what pleasures they can, to avoid predators, and to make little ones after their kind.  To pointlessly destroy them for the sheer pleasure of doing it is offensive to both one's moral and aesthetic sensibilities.  With a domesticated animal, its death is a feature of processing it for sale and  consumption.  With a wild animal, the hunter killing it is the end purpose -- it is killed for the sake of killing it.

As to our freedoms being taken away, do we have a right to deface national monuments?  To cut down trees in national parks?  Why should there be any right to kill somebody else's animals?  Forbidding vandalism and arson reduces no one's freedom because no one has a right to do those things.  Forbidding hunting is the same.  Even now, no one has a right to take deer out of season or to shoot fawns.  No one has a right to shoot polar bears.  

I have long intended to draft a private bill to require that hunting in California be done only with handmade stone knives.  Even spears and bows would be outlawed.  Then it would really be a sport.  Catching a deer would be a real trick.  I would use the license fees to fund a program to reintroduce the grizzly bear into California.  Anybody who wanted to hunt grizzly bears with a stone knife would be free to do it.  The program would include awarding a certificate suitable for framing to the hunter's widow.  If it were a particularly spectacular ending, the ears and nose might be awarded to the grizzly bear if they could be found. This would also help solve the overpopulation of hunters problem.  Since grizzly bears generally go around in deshabille, I thought it would be fitting for the hunters to have to be naked too.  But this could cause problems on the way to and from hunting areas and possibly attract a bad element to the sport.