Tag Archives: hunting

Ammo Sapiens

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Maybe we need to refer to the species as Ammo sapiens. Because if there’s one thing humans are endlessly resourceful about, it’s making and using weapons.

The NRA and the 2nd Amendment are evidence of the corruption and the loneliness of our kind. The person buying weapons, vowing they’re just for hunting, or the President who says the deer aren’t wearing Kevlar vests so, hey, we can live without military-style machine guns and keep the rest…They are still supporting the weapon makers.

Whether it’s a deer, a bear, or a human ape in the crosshairs, whether it’s semi-automatic or not, violence is violence, and human aggression is our problem.

We could be so much better, so much stronger, so much more aware of the meaning of every moment in another being’s life.

_____

Photo source: Stephen Andrews, via Pexels.

“The Deer Aren’t Wearing Kevlar® Vests!” A Word on Gun Control in the United States

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Gun control advocates are quick to insist that they’re not interfering with hunting and hunters. On 60 Minutes this week, again, Joe Biden repeated the punchline: We can do without military-grade rifles; the deer aren’t wearing Kevlar® vests! Ha ha ha. We can explode deer bodies with regular old guns, so come on, man! Let’s just ban the assault weapons!

When we understand ourselves in, and as, animal life…we know the gun debate is indeed about hunting. Targeting people in a grocery store, or stalking deer in the suburban woods… it’s a continuum. We the People have a penchant for treating other lives as our targets. 

Some beings are more targeted than others. Whether one is placed in the crosshairs because of foreignness, race, class, species, or other perceived vulnerability, all are the subjects of ruthless de-personhood. 

The Warning Calls of Prairie Dogs

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson wrote, in the Foreword to On Their Own Terms – Animal Liberation:

…I considered the warning calls of prairie dogs. They include one to announce that a human is approaching, yet another when a human approaches with a gun.

Finding out about others without desiring to use or have them, intimidate or subordinate them may be the hardest thing of all for humans to do.

I write this from Pennsylvania, where the greedy lobbyists for Sunday hunting (they always make claims about the revenue hunting brings to the Commonwealth) recently got what they wanted.

When we reverse this bloody thinking, when we work to designate parks and their surroundings as gun- and trap-free zones, we stand for the birthright of conscious, living living beings, human or non-, to prevail over the gunmakers.

I dream of the day that guns (along with whips, jail cells, bird cages, spurs, bombs, and fishing poles) may only be found in museums. As a vegan, I work for the day.

Love and liberation,

Lee.

Interdependence Day

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As we war amongst ourselves, our artificially created groups, deploying hazards across constructed borders, impeding the natural movement of humanity and nonhumanity alike, 

We also war on others 

In our great biological communities.

Industry celebrates our independence from nature 

Or dominance over it.

This is our decision. We could, instead, celebrate interdependence with our world. 

I write, just before noon, attuned to the distant calls of mourning doves.

Those who stalk mourning doves in the United States and Canada often use the singular term “hunting dove” thereby erasing the individuality of these birds. They know the birds will come for seeds. To get more targets to shoot, the hunters plant wheat, sorghum, corn and poppies, millet and sunflowers.

Is there anything sweeter than the thought of a dove eating sunflower seeds?

I heard fireworks last night, the 3rd of July. I heard the resident geese call out when the noise started.

There will be more explosions tonight.  

Photo by John Duncan, via Unsplash.