Hunting

Six samples available: the first five are from one letter I wrote for Shawnee, the last is a quote, if you use the last one, please source with name and title.


SAMPLE ONE

Animals are inherently sentient and possess the capacity for thought and emotion, including contentment, loneliness, fear, and agony. All animals, human and non-human, experience the desire to live free from exploitation and suffering and fear the manifestation of death. Humans have adopted dangerous constructs of speciesism, the prejudicial disregard of non-human species, to validate the brutality inflicted upon them. Using this manufactured status of superiority, humans have sanctioned the use of animals as commodities, regarding them only as products to benefit our goals and needs. We embrace inequity to justify our treatment of animals, which is mere savagery concealed in socially-approved descriptions.


SAMPLE TWO

It is impossible for me to even contemplate the desire to kill. If you take a moment to invite the thought, imagine the need, consider the implications, you cannot escape the inevitable conclusion of depravity that initiates the process. Despite your promotion of validations used to cultivate societal approval, your actuality is slaughter, the calculated hunt and subsequent kill. Your black and white diplomatic banalities cannot conceal the red of the blood, the immobilizing, excruciating pain, the struggle to escape, the agony of incapacity, the fear of death, the evisceration of life. You recoil at gruesome descriptions, your tedious proposals absent the illustrations of deathly consequences you so easily sign with impunity and indifference. Regardless of culturally accepted monikers of preservation and conservation, however, and despite appeals using biased and emotionally-charged rhetoric, the reality includes the deliberate and vicious killing of sentient non-human animals.


SAMPLE THREE

Killing is inherently malicious, and sanctioning malice requires apathy towards brutality and a desire to create death. There is no deviation possible from this principle philosophy, and embedding viciousness in conciliatory verbiage and legalese only forgives words, not actions. When you approve hunting, you embrace malice and invite bloodshed into your communities. The images of people expressing joy and pride alongside intentionally killed beings is not only disturbing, it is also a facilitation of cruelty. You are not modeling your behaviour after compassion and tolerance but demonstrating brutal death as an acceptable response to innocent life. I envision you, debating occasionally, championing your party, accepting concessions, gesticulating and arguing, your Robert’s Rules a bible of procedure, the impropriety of sanctioned death hidden in cursory signatures representing the weapons that will cease the lives.


SAMPLE FOUR

I will not discuss ecology, balance, religion, or conservation: these are your embellished dictates meant to promote acceptance and reason, but which are fundamentally immoral, excluding compassion and any regard towards animals who don’t possess your capacity to observe or understand egotistical, speciesist tendencies. The criminalization of these animals based on your biased perceptions is a perversion of reason and logic. All human and non-human animal life is tangibly sacred and worthy of freedom from exploitation and suffering. Your discussion to needlessly and viciously kill is a personification of malevolence, and I ask that you instead extend a compassionate and equal gesture to observe and accept life rather than viciously extinguish it.


SAMPLE FIVE

Humans have adopted dangerous constructs of speciesism, the prejudicial disregard of non-human species, to validate the brutality inflicted upon them. Using this manufactured status of superiority, humans have sanctioned the use of animals as commodities, regarding them only as products to benefit our goals and needs. We embrace inequity to justify our treatment of animals, yet euphemistic descriptions meant to facilitate morality cannot disguise the fundamentally unethical parameters with which we surround ourselves to distinguish our self-serving dominance. As dangerous as racism and sexism, speciesism further divides the chasm between species, which desensitizes us to cruelty and inevitably leads to human inequality and injustice.

This disregard of your most vulnerable group of beings is unacceptable, and until this barbarism is appropriately addressed including a mandatory ban of such, I will boycott. Indeed, allow me to emphasize that it would be financially detrimental for you to enable the harm done to these animals. I and others will collectively voice condemnation of you resulting in the sacrifice of vital tourism and commerce profits. Please act responsibly and with compassion and choose to protect, rather than sanction harm, to animals.


SAMPLE SIX

Why don’t I hunt? I could allude to the fruits of exhaustive research into the ecological and biological consequences of hunting, and to collective insights of biologists, ecologists, and naturalists who challenge the prevailing wildlife-management dogma. Yet, fundamentally, the answer can be expressed in simple moral terms:

Hunting is wrong, and should be acknowledged to be so not only by those who espouse the precepts of the animal-rights credo, but by those who hold a common sense of decency, respect, and justice.

When we have exposed the specious reasoning of the hunters’ apologists and stripped their sport of its counterfeit legitimacy, the naked brutality of hunting defines itself: killing for the fun of it.

Steve Ruggeri, Why I Don’t Hunt