Editor:
Re: An easy, ethical hunting answer, Oct. 29 letters.
The idiocy of the two letters extolling hunting demands a rebuttal.
Letter-writer Lance Ponych pouts that as cats kill birds, why should he not massacre flocks of birds?
But Felix kills out of pure instinct. He never says to himself (in catspeak): “Well it’s a nice day so I will just mosey out and deliberately kill a bunch of wildlife… for fun!”
Letter-writer Michael J. Klaver jabbers about the tradition of hunting.
But that was when hunting was necessary to eat. Traditions are not forever. Traditional fox-hunting has been banned in numerous countries.
Klaver seems obsessed with the word “ethical.” He uses it no less than six times.
Unfortunately he does not explain what “ethical hunting” means. Bambi still dies slowly and painfully from the all-too-frequent wounding shot, whether fired by an “ethical” hunter or any other kind.
My main disdain for hunting is the myth that it is a sport; which implies a contest that might be lost. Certain success is no contest.
Note that polls show that over 98.7 per cent of all hunters would abandon hunting if the prey could shoot back.
David Poole, Surrey
• • •
Letter-writer Michael J. Klaver trots out the old sophistry that hunting is OK because it has always been done. In fact he says it is “a proud Canadian tradition” – an indelible part of our culture.
Mr. Klaver, tradition is not the great sanctifier you claim it is. If it were, we would still be burning witches, disenfranchising women, pitting dogs against one another, etc.
Culture is no defence for cruelty. How any man can take pride in reducing a living animal to a bloody mass of fin or fur or feathers is beyond the imagination.
And then there is the use of the term “ethical hunting” - a dissembling misnomer of gargantuan proportions. Hunting is nothing more than cowardice in action. It can never be anything more no matter how you try to dress it up or disguise it. An animal is killed for a hunter’s pleasure. It is a death for no reason. And death for no reason is murder.
Mr. Klaver, you end your letter by saying, “You live your life, and I will live mine.”
It is a pity you that you seem to lack the compassion to extend that freedom to the animals you hunt.
Perry Walker, Surrey