From: viking@iastate.edu (Dan Sorenson)
Subject: Re: Colorado Hunters under attack
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 05:53:55 GMT

sherw@ocf.berkeley.edu (Gregory Sherwin) writes:

	Here's *another* poster from Berkeley on this!  What is this thing
about Berkely posters that I have?

>Nope - that hunting is to kill animals out of a sense of fun and pleasure
>as opposed to a means of survival makes it barbaric. 

	And also makes sex, beer, and virtually anything else people enjoy
barbaric.  I suggest you need to examine your criterion again.

> I think there is some
>truth to the idea to "take only what you need from this earth", and by
>putting slugs in animals brains because it has something to do with
>having fun and appreciating the great outdoors as opposed to feeding your
>family perverts humanity's place within nature.

	You thing wrong.  Hunting is not just a chore, even if those
three rounds are all that stands between eating watered-down kale soup
and a half-pound venison steak.  As little as two generations ago
this was common, and even today it's not at all unknown.  My grandfather
fed his entire family with a 12ga shotgun and two shells, hunting daily.
Some days they went without, others they spent an evening skinning and
salting the meat, and still others were spent trudging into town to
trade skins for supplies the land didn't provide.  Heritage?  Go back
a mere 60 years and you find that it is a heritage, and as for the
place of humanity in nature perhaps you might look at how apes kill
smaller monkeys and distribute the kill among the tribe, or at how a
lion pride will congregate after a kill.  There is nothing at all
unnatural about killing others to feed yourself; the only difference
is that humans tend to pity the prey.  Lions and apes do not.

>  Maybe you don't think
>that killing a moose or a rhino to put its head on your wall is a waste,
>but I do.

	I do too.  There's lots of meat on those bones, not to mention
the hooves make great stands for a drinking horn.  So, what has this
to do with hunting or heritage?

>  Fact is that we as humans are animals just the same - and when
>we kill not out of survival, we are acting not as if we exist within
>nature, but above it.

	This is rich!  Pardon me, but your neighborhood cat need not kill
a mouse to survive, so it must be above nature too.  Really!  Do you
*think* about these things?  What about the dolphins who kill sharks
swimming near their midst?  It happens, and as any nautical type knows
a shark is hardly a threat to a dolphin in any practical sense.

>  That this world was created solely for the amusement
>of humans.

	I have yet to see a hunter even postulate this.  You seem to take
it as a given.  Your ignorance of hunting in general and hunters in
particular has just been shown once again.

>  But you see - that is a fallacy.  If we pollute and turn the
>planet into a charred mud ball, we have to live in that crap.  It goes
>full circle.

	I would bet my life's savings Berkeley is more of a charred
mud ball than anyplace in Iowa.  Guess which state has more hunters?
Are they somehow related?  Could it be those who use and have their
lives influenced by the land might care a bit about it, and see to it
that the land is used and not wasted?  In short, hunters plant a
few hundred acres in bromegrass and plant trees as windbreaks.  City
folks wear birkenstocks and don't eat at McDonalds.  Frankly, the
latter not only looks silly, it's hardly directly effective.

>To justify killing out of recreation is to justify any serial murderer
>who gets off on watching people die.

	These days it's called the "insanity" defense.  Your tax
dollars at work keeping them alive and paying for the appeals.

>And if we claim this superiority over
>our own backyards (ie. nature/animals/etc) not out of a sense of mutual
>survival , but out of an egotistical and self-satisfied sense of
>intellectual superiority, we may as well hunt mentally retarded people for
>the fun of it too.

	We have.  However, recognize that mankind is the biggest, baddest,
toughest kid on the planetary block.  Things live at our whim.  That
there exist a great myraid of plant and animal life on this planet in
addition to ourselves only shows that mankind isn't as morally bankrupt
as you seem to imagine.

>Drinking beer in and of itself is not unethical at all per se if you read me.
>However, drinking beer becomes unethical when you do so in order to maximize 
>the amount of fun you have as you go drunk-driving over a few unwary
>pedestrians here and there on the way home.

	On the contrary, the beer drinking has nothing to do with it.
The only unethical portion of your sentence is running over unwary
pedestrians, an act that does not require alcohol nor is it morally
less or more reprehensible with alcohol involved.  Indeed, the moral
criterion is one of intent, not intoxication.

>Call me interesting I suppose, Mary.

	Sorry, Interesting, but a bit of knowledge of the acts you
so easily condemn might do well to enlighten your consciousness.

< Dan Sorenson, DoD #1066 z1dan@exnet.iastate.edu viking@iastate.edu >
<  ISU only censors what I read, not what I say.  Don't blame them.  >
<  "Are you *SURE* he's worth a Harley-Davidson?" -- my grandmother  >
< to my girlfriend, about me.  "I'd better not say" -- my girlfriend >

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