DO ANIMALS SUFFER?
INTRODUCTION
You want to be a hunter. Perhaps you've already done some hunting, or maybe you're still looking forward to your first trip out with a gun. Either way, you think hunting is a fun thing to do.
I understand that. When I was a young man, hunting was a way for me to enjoy the company of older men while learning to appreciate the outdoors. In a lifetime of hunting and fishing, my father had learned a lot about nature and the creatures who live in it. And while I just thought our hunting trips were fun, he used them to teach me all about the outdoors: things like firearm safety, respect for game laws and other people's property, and survival skills. But the lessons that I looked forward to the most were how to find and take the game.
The key to success, he told me over and over, is to learn to think like the animal. It was a lesson I took to heart in ways that neither of us expected.
THINK LIKE THE ANIMAL
By "think like the animal," he meant that I needed to know the likes and dislikes of the animals I hunted, their favorite paths and feeding places, their habits and their fears. That way I could anticipate their moves and avoid spooking them. He meant that if you think like the hunted, you will be a better hunter.
"Think like the hunted." I had always thought like the hunter. I knew how it felt to lie in ambush for an unsuspecting squirrel and blow her away with a powerful gun. But how did it feel to think like the hunted? Trying to answer that question, I asked myself several others, questions that I think all of us should ask before we go out and take life.
DO ANIMALS SUFFER?
If you grew up in the country, or if you have a dog, a cat, or a parakeet, you know that this is a silly question. When animals are threatened, they are afraid. When they are teased, they get angry. When they are injured, they feel pain. And when they are with someone they love, they are happy. They may not understand calculus (for that matter, neither do I) or know anything about American history, but when it comes to these basic feelings, they are not very different from you and me. Every day I see this in the animals around me, and so do you.
But if dogs and cats and farm animals can suffer the same way that people do, so can wildlife. If we see less evidence of it, this is not due to any difference among the animals; it is because we have a different relationship to them. Domesticated animals show us feelings that wild animals hide. They let us get to know them better. If you are thinking like the animal, there is no difference between the suffering of a deer or a squirrel and that of a dog or a cat.
It should not surprise us that animals have the same basic feelings that we have. After all, they have the same five senses, the same type of nervous system, and a brain that is similar to ours in the areas that control sensation and emotion. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, internationally respected scientists, put it this way: "The limbic system in the human brain, known to be responsible for much of the richness of our emotional life, is prominent throughout the mammals. The same drugs that alleviate suffering in humans mitigate the cries and other signs of pain in many other animals. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer."
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE HUNTED?
Let's play a little science fiction game, using our imaginations to help us think like the animal.
Suppose the inhabitants of the planet Zargon are great sport hunters, and the human beings on planet Earth are their favorite game. The Zargonians' technology is so much more advanced than ours that no weapon we have can cause them serious injury. We cannot hurt them. Furthermore, they carry weapons that can kill or wound us at great distances, before we even know that they are anywhere around. Every time we hear the terrible crash of those weapons, we run and hide, but whether we survive is as much a matter of luck as anything else. Sometimes the Zargonian hunters hide and shoot us from ambush. Other times they chase us with vicious Zargonian hounds until we are exhausted. Some of them even bait us with candy or other treats and shoot us as we eat. Sometimes they kill us cleanly, with one shot. But even Zargonians are not perfect, and often their terrible weapons only injure us and leave us to bleed to death or die of infection, painfully, hopelessly, over hours or days. Perhaps some of us are children, and a Zargonian hunter kills our mother, leaving us to starve to death, frightened and alone. Perhaps one of us is a mother, and dies knowing that her children are orphans.
In this situation, what would you think about sport hunting, and what would your opinion be of the Zargonians? Would you think they were good people? Would you think that they respected human life the way hunters claim to respect wildlife?
ISN'T THAT ANTHROPOMORPHISM?
We are always being warned about something called "anthropomorphism," which means attributing to animals the characteristics of human beings. It would be anthropomorphism to say that animals discuss politics or worry about global warming. But in our science fiction game about the Zargonians, these kinds of intellectual capacities did not come into play. We were dealing with feelings that are common to all of the higher animals, including birds. It is not anthropomorphism to say that hunting causes animals to suffer fear and pain. It is simply fact.
IS HUNTING COWARDLY?
Hunters are rarely in any danger from the animals they hunt. They inflict pain and death on creatures who cannot hurt them, and who would not want to if they could. Unless they are cornered or protecting their young, even bears and cougars will normally run rather than fight a human being. And most of the animals hunted in the United States, from white-tailed deer to squirrels and rabbits, to geese and ducks and mourning doves, are never dangerous to the hunter. Very few hunting injuries are inflicted by animals, and nearly all are caused by carelessness. Most hunters who are killed are shot, by themselves or other hunters. It is not the animals who make hunting dangerous.
To terrify, to cause physical agony, to kill a creature that can do you no harm is the worst kind of bullying. Hunting is a cowardly act. I am not saying that hunters are cowards. My father was a brave man, and so are many other hunters I have known. But the act of hunting is cowardly, and it does brave men and women no credit. If they would truly think like the animal, hunters would realize this very quickly.
IS IT WEAK TO THINK LIKE THE ANIMAL?
We all admire toughness, and we know that you have to be tough in order to get along in life. It is tough and courageous to go on in spite of your own fear or suffering, but it takes no toughness or courage at all to go on in spite of someone else's. All it takes is insensitivity. Compassion for the suffering of others is not weakness. Sometimes it can take more courage and strength of character to show compassion when those around you do not than it does just to go along with everyone else's cruelty.
Compassion has been held up as the highest virtue by all of the world's great religions and philosophers, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Albert Schweitzer, the renowned scholar and medical doctor who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 said, "We must never become callous . . . The quiet conscience is an invention of the Devil."
The more a creature is at your mercy, the more important it is for you to show mercy.
WHAT ABOUT WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT?
Wildlife populations go up and down because of things like the size of their habitat, how much food and water they can find, how many natural predators are around, and how severe the weather is. They manage themselves without our help. Sometimes, where human development has destroyed too much habitat and eliminated too much of the food supply, it is necessary for people to step in and establish refuges, where wildlife habitat and food supply will be preserved intact. But sport hunting is not a part of that process.
People often argue that hunting is necessary to control overpopulation and prevent wild animals from becoming a nuisance, or even a hazard, to humans. This argument is hardly ever used for any animal except white-tailed deer, who it is claimed, will eat the shrubs on people's lawns and collide with cars if they are not killed first by hunters. The fact is that most states deliberately try to increase the deer population so that there will be more deer for hunters to shoot. Then the state game agencies contend they have to allow hunting because there are too many deer. In the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area, for example, near The Fund For Animals' campaign office in Maryland, local farmers are allowed to plant corn inside the Area. The increased food supply results in a larger deer herd for hunters.
To put the overpopulation argument in perspective, white-tailed deer are only 2 percent of the 200 million animals killed every year by hunters. Fifty million, or 25 percent, are mourning doves. Thirty million, 15 percent, are squirrels. Millions more are geese and ducks. No one has ever tried to claim that we are threatened by an overpopulation of ducks, geese, or doves. In fact, with waterfowl the concern of wildlife managers is to keep hunters from killing so many that they become extinct. The question asked every year is not "How many do we need to kill?" but "How many can we let people kill?"
The reason for sport hunting is not responsible wildlife management, despite all the claims to the contrary. The reason for sport hunting is that some people enjoy it. The wildlife management argument is simply a way to keep people from recognizing sport hunting for what it is: cruelty to animals.
ISN'T HUNTING KINDER THAN LETTING THEM STARVE IN THE WINTER?
Again, this is an argument that is made for deer, who represent a small fraction of the animals killed by hunters. It cannot be used to justify the killing of millions of waterfowl, upland game birds, squirrels, and rabbits every year.
If hunters were truly concerned about the suffering of starving deer, they would stop insisting that state wildlife agencies keep the size of the herds large. Hunting deer to eliminate the possibility that they may starve in a bad winter is not compassion. It is an excuse for something that hunters want to do for their own pleasure.
ISN'T IT OKAY IF I EAT WHAT I KILL?
Even in rural areas, we do not live on the frontier. Hunting today is done because the hunter enjoys it, not because he and his family need the meat to live. This brings us back to our earlier point: it is cruel to pursue, injure and kill animals for pleasure. The fact that the killer then eats the meat, which he does not need to survive, does nothing to change that. If the Zargonians ate our flesh after they had killed humans for fun, would that change your view of Zargonians and their hunting practices?
BUT THE MEAT IN STORES AND RESTAURANTS COMES FROM SLAUGHTERED ANIMALS
Yes, it does. Giving up hunting may not be going all the way to thinking like the animals, but it is an important step in the right direction. And it is a step you can make right now without any great effort or changes to the way you live.
HAVEN'T HUMAN BEINGS ALWAYS BEEN HUNTERS?
Sometimes people argue that we hunt because hunting has been bred into us from prehistoric times, that "It's in our genes." But if this is true, why do less than 6 percent of us hunt? If hunting were genetic, wouldn't the number be far larger? Part of being human, perhaps the most important part, is that we have a free will. We are able to make moral choices in the present. We are not doomed to mindlessly repeat past patterns of behavior.
Other times people argue that hunting is a time honored tradition that teaches an appreciation of nature and builds bonds between fathers and sons as that tradition is passed on. But tradition is no excuse for cruelty. Many things were once traditional that we now recognize are wrong. Slavery, for example, and denying women the right to vote or own property. Traditions evolve as we become more enlightened.
The hunting tradition can easily evolve into a tradition of orienteering and wildlife photography. This would provide the same opportunities for learning to appreciate nature and for traditions to be passed on from parents to children without the cruelty and death that are central to hunting. It is just as easy to mount a camera on a rifle stock as a gun barrel.
TWO HUNTING STORIES
In November 1994, I took part in a discussion of sport hunting on a cable television program in Maine. The pro-hunting viewpoint was represented by Robert J. Barry, Assistant Executive Director of the Sportsmen's Alliance of Maine, the largest hunting organization in the state. "Buzz" Barry, as he is known to his friends, is an outdoorsman's outdoorsman. For more than forty years, he has been an avid hunter, fisherman, and camper in New England and Canada. Buzz Barry is no city-bred animal rights activist.
When we had finished taping, Buzz and I had lunch with the show's host, Alice Giordano, at a nearby restaurant, where we continued our conversation. Over coffee, Buzz told us that he had never been able to reconcile himself to the fear and suffering that hunting causes the animals. To illustrate what he meant, he told us two stories from his personal experience.
Deer hunting one afternoon, Buzz shot and wounded a doe, who immediately fled into the woods. Only then did he see the young fawn with her, who fled in the other direction, terrified. When he finally caught up with the mother, "she was looking back over her shoulder, not so much for me, but for the fawn that was accompanying her. That really bothers me," Buzz added, "because I know I caused pain and fear to that animal."
On another occasion, he wounded a young buck. When Buzz tracked him down, "He was pushing himself up against the stump of a tree as hard as he could, trying to escape me. I'll never forget the fear, the terror in his eyes."
These are not the macho fantasies that you read in the hunting magazines. They are honest memories of real hunting. And they are memories that Buzz Barry wishes he did not have. Which brings us to the last question that you should ask yourself before you go into the woods with a gun. Are these the kind of memories you want to have?
The Fund for Animals wants you to consider all sides of the hunting issue carefully and with an open mind. When you do, we believe you will decide that killing animals who live in the wild is not the way you want to enjoy the outdoors.
We invite you to take the Young Person's Pledge To Respect Wildlife:
I recognize that wild animals can suffer. I recognize that they deserve our compassion and respect. Therefore, I solemnly pledge myself to enjoy the outdoors without stalking and killing the animals who live there.
