What the Hare says

What the Hare says: "I hop, therefor I am."

Genesis 1:28 - “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”

“Among [U.S. Interior Secretary] Zinke's appointees [to the national wildlife protection board] is Steven Chancellor, a longtime Republican fundraiser and chairman of American Patriot Group, an Indiana-based conglomerate [...]

      According to Safari Club member hunting records obtained in 2015 by the Humane Society, Chancellor has logged nearly 500 kills — including at least 18 lions, 13 leopards, six elephants and two rhinos.” (http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-wildlife-protection-board-trophy-hunters-1.4578852)

President Obama restricted the importation to the US of hunting trophies for certain endangered species. Not unexpectedly, the current US administration—heavily influenced by the NRA, the Safari Club and other hunting “sport” organizations—is beginning to unravel the restrictions. What good is spending fifty-thousand dollars for the thrill of killing a dominant bull elephant in a dwindling Kenyan population if you can’t cut off parts of him and hang them in your den to prove your hunting prowess?

 

For those who acknowledge the symbiosis of all life, of the miracle of life itself, the reverence for nature has always been characterized by a grateful, familial attitude toward living things. What is it, then, that kindles an impulse in us—when we behold the most magnificent creatures of nature—to reach for a rifle and kill them? Is it triumphal? Does the lion’s head on the wall announce that I am more than other men, more than the most dangerous animal even? If so, does it speak more about my failed humanity than about anything else? A need to compensate in the most dramatic fashion I can think of?

 

It’s been suggested that if hunting were a real sport, the camera and the sound recorder would be the “weapons” of choice. Indeed, proving that one has “sportingly” stalked and approached a dangerous animal—and lived—can be proven photographically. Seemingly, then, it would be only the killing that would be missing for people like Steven Chancellor. To contemplate that killing can be thrilling is, in its barest essence, extremely discouraging. What hope for peace can there be in a world where baseball and killing are both “sports?”

 

A classic short story by Richard Connell imagines a big game hunter who—bored with hunting animals— devises a game in which he traps and hunts down men with a 22 Caliber handgun. (http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/danger.html) It’s been suggested that when the obsession with hunting down and killing animals no longer satisfies, secret societies will form in which stalking and killing men becomes the new challenge. We have a model for this in the bizarre practices to which unbridled sexual obsessions and compulsions can lead: the same game as yesterday is never enough.

 

Well, that’s probably taking concerns “over the top,” but I can’t find a good argument against the view that our respect for life can be blunted given time and exposure to ever-increasing violence. Whether we see our universe as created or evolved makes little difference when considering the sacredness of life; everything we know now about the cosmos should tell us that earthly life in all its forms is not just a thing, it’s the only thing!

 

We humans are “impaled on the horns of a dilemma,” as they say. It’s a dilemma magnificently explored by the writer of the creation narrative in Genesis 1. Had we—like the rabbits and the deer and the hawks and fishes—never passed the threshold that gave us reason, language, love and hate, guilt or innocence (the substance of all that that differentiates us as godlike but mortal creatures), Eden would still be ours. But we have eaten of the tree and in so doing, taken on all the agonies of “the knowledge of good and evil.” It means that things like life-giving or life-taking are choices for us, matters on which our judgments mean, not something, but everything.

 

There are unlimited examples of the carelessness with which we waste that overweening miracle we call life. Carelessness in our sexuality turns into abortion as birth-control; carelessness in conservation turns into the contamination and depletion of our very food and water supplies; carelessness in our politics lands us in wars, death and refugee camps; carelessness in our economic structures perpetuates all manner of illness common to poverty; carelessness in child-rearing and education works to dumb down our very cultures and render us vulnerable to all manner of life-robbing misery.

 

It’s time that life-giving or life-taking became the profit-and-loss measures of our civilization. The trophy hunters of the world—seen in this light—are symptomatic of a much larger issue: a pervasive (and possibly growing) carelessness about the value of life . . . and us as its only, flawed champions. 

(Stalk a lion, tie a ribbon to his tail while he's sleeping, then run home and I'll believe you when you tell me what a man you are!)