On Hunting & Fishing

Glendon Swarthout
Bless the Beasts and the Children
And one by one, driven to exhaustion, trapped by fence and bewilderment, under an immaculate sky, the creatures died. They died not in mercy, not in the majesty which was their due, but as the least of life, accursed of nature. They died in the dust of insult and the spittle of lead. [TOP]

James Anthony Froude, 1818-1894
Oceana
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. [TOP]

Lemuel T. Ward
A Hunter’s Poem
A hunter shot at a flock of geese
That flew within his reach.
Two were stopped in their rapid flight
And fell on the sandy beach.
The male bird lay at the water’s edge
And just before he died,
He faintly called to his wounded mate
And she dragged herself to his side.
She bent her head and crooned to him
In a way distressed and wild
Caressing her one and only mate
As a mother would a child.
Then covering him with her broken wing
And gasping with failing breath
She laid her head against his breast
A feeble honk ... then death.
This story is true though crudely told;
I was the man in this case.
I stood knee-deep in snow and cold
As the hot tears burned my face.
I buried them in the sand where they lay
Wrapped in my hunting coat
And I threw my gun and belt in the bay
When I crossed in the open boat.
Hunters will call me a right poor sport
And scoff at the thing I did,
But that day something broke in my heart
And shoot again? God forbid! [TOP]

Robert F. Leslie
All hunting, except for survival, is a shabby postponement of growing up. [TOP]

Bernard Mandeville, 1670-1733
The Fable of the Bees
It is only man, mischievous man, who can make death a sport. [TOP]

Ellen DeGeneres
On Location: Women of the Night
You ask people why they have deer heads on the wall. They always say, “Because it’s such a beautiful animal.” There you go. I think my mother’s attractive, but I have photographs of her. [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Walden
No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder a creature who holds its life by the same tenure that he does ... the squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest. [TOP]

Ibid.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake: It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. [TOP]

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592
An Apology of Raymond Sebond
For my part, I have never been able to see, without displeasure, an innocent and defenseless animal from whom we receive no offense or harm, pursued and slaughtered. [TOP]

Leslie G. Pine, 1907-
After Their Blood
These bloody sportsmen are enough to sicken any decent person. What in the name of wonder is the matter with them? Why must their amusement be always accompanied by death for some other part of creation? [TOP]

Ibid.
It is our duty as men and women of God’s redeemed creation to try not to increase the suffering of the world, but to lessen it. To get rid of bloodsports will be a great step toward this end. [TOP]

Ibid.
... [Blood sports are] unnecessary, odious, and horrible, suitable only for a lower stage of civilization. [TOP]

John Wolcot, 1738-1819
To a Fish in the Brook
Why fliest thou away with fear?
Trust me there’s naught of danger near,
I have no wicked hook
All covered with a snaring bait,
Alas, to tempt thee to thy fate,
And drag thee from the brook.
Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;
And when an angler for his dish,
Through glutton’ys vile sin,
Attempts, a wretch, to pull thee out,
God give thee strength, O gentle trout,
To pull the rascal in! [TOP]

Gilbert Murray, 1866-1957
Voice of the Voiceless
The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing “sport” and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary, and now perverted. [TOP]

Joseph Wood Krutch, 1893-1970
The Great Chain of Life
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman... How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur and feathers is beyond my comprehension. [TOP]

Lewis Gompertz, 1779-1865
Moral Inquiries of the Situation of Man and of Brutes
Who can dispute the inhumanity of the sport of hunting—of pursuing a poor defenseless creature for mere amusement, till it becomes exhausted by terror and fatigue ... How can men, and even women, possibly justify it? And what can their pleasure in it consist of? [TOP]

Iris Murdoch, 1919-
The Black Prince
They were shooting pigeons. What an image of our condition, the loud report, the poor flopping bundles upon the ground, trying desperately, helplessly, vainly to rise again. Through tears I saw the stricken birds tumbling over and over down the sloping roofs of warehouses. I saw and heard their sudden weight, their pitiful surrender to gravity. How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. At one moment—graceful, mysterious, desirable and free, and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. [TOP]

Jimmy Stewart
The Reader’s Digest, commenting about abandoning big-game hunting
Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I’m finished “shooting,” my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. [TOP]

Paul Richard, 1874-1939
The Scourge of Christ
Hunting ... the least honorable form of war on the weak. [TOP]

His Holiness the XIV Dali Lama of Tibet, 1935-
The Vegetarian Way
Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures... is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality. [TOP]

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1919
Voice of the Voiceless
Oh, never a brute in the forest and never a snake in the fen
Or ravening bird, starvation stirred, has hunted its prey like men.
For hunger and fear and passion alone drive beasts to slay,
But wonderful man, the crown of the plan, tortures and kills for play. [TOP]

Loren Eiseley, 1907-
The Star Thrower
One man sees a red fox running through a shaft of sunlight and raises a rifle; another lays a restraining hand on his companion’s arm and says, “Please. There goes the last wild gaiety in the world. Let it live. Let it run.” [TOP]

William Cowper, 1731-1800
My intimate acquaintance with these animals has taught me to hold the sportsman’s amusement in abhorrence; he little knows what amiable creatures he persecutes, of what gratitude they are capable, how cheerful they are in their spirits, what enjoyment they have of life, and that, impressed as they seem with a peculiar dread of man, it is only because man gives them a peculiar cause for it. [TOP]

Roger Caras, 1924-
Remember this: In your lifetime you will meet many nonhunters who were formerly hunters, men and women who have matured and stopped the nonsense. You will never meet a nonhunter who has matured into a hunter. [TOP]

Geoffrey L. Rudd, 1909-
on the Royal Family’s hunting trip to India, letter in the Manchester Evening News, 1/27/61
Who dare claim that an animal is not caused great torment by a violent death? ... It is monstrous and nauseating that our Royal representatives should so manifestly enjoy the barbarous pastimes of shooting, hunting, and killing for fun—bad even in our country where the country types are encouraged to be sadists... [TOP]

Walter Cronkite, 1916-
Vegetarian Times
The perils of duck hunting are great, especially for the duck. [TOP]

Judge Bailey Brown
I don’t understand why anyone would want to kill a hawk. I have a lot of friends who hunt and this is an aspect of their personality I don’t understand. I would rather spend a day in jail than go hunting. [TOP]

Dr. Karl Menninger, 1893-
Voice of the Voiceless
I am glad to know that you are carrying on your campaign against cruelty to animals. I am unalterably opposed to hunting of all mammals and most birds because I am opposed to making a pleasure out of inflicting suffering. To torture people or animals for fun, or indeed, for any reason, seems morally reprehensible to me. It is a relic of the preoccupations and morality of primitive man. [TOP]

Henry S. Salt, 1851-1939
Mr. Facing Both Ways
When the Huntsman claims praise for the killing of foxes,
Which else would bring ruin to farmer and land,
Yet so kindly imports them, preserves them, assorts them,
There’s a descrepance I’d fain understand.
Hark you, then, whose pastime is killing!
To dispel your benignant illusions I’m loathe;
But be one or the other, my double-faced brother,
Be slayer or savior—you cannot be both. [TOP]

Clarence Shepard Day, Jr., 1874-1935
This Simian World
The creatures who want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless, we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well brought up shoot them for fun. [TOP]

Lady Florence Dixie, 1857-1905
The Horrors of Sport
And the pheasants! They are on every side, some rising, some dropping; some lying dead, but the great majority fluttering on the ground wounded; some with both legs broken and a wing; some with both wings broken and a leg; others merely winged, running to hide; others mortally wounded, gasping out their last breath amidst the hellish uproar which surrounds them. And this is called “sport”! [TOP]

from an interview
Experience has taught me the cruelty and horror of this much miscalled sport. Wide travel, much contact with the animal world, and a good deal of experience in a variety of sports have all combined to make me ashamed and deeply regretful for every life my hand has taken. [TOP]

John Steinbeck, 1902-1968
The Sea of Cortez
We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerors. Possibly it feels good to these men to be superior to animals, but does it not seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it? Often a man who is afraid must constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must keep a tangible record of his courage. [TOP]

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784
quoted in Birkbeck Hill’s Johnsonian Miscellanies
It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them. [TOP]

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900
A Woman of No Importance
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. [TOP]

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