Ask the Animal if it's a "Game"

A friend posted a link to a Facebook community entitled “STOP Trophy Hunting NOW” that contains some truly unsettling photos of proud, smiling men posing with the corpses of their kills: rhinos and elephants and lions and tigers and bears. (Arrogant little rich boy Donald Trump Jr. is among them, knife and severed elephant tail in hand.) Big game hunters – especially those who hunt from jeeps and helicopters and ridicule those who don’t share their bloodlust – are a type of human being with whom I can’t relate on any level.

I find trophy hunting disgusting, horrific and indefensible. In my view it’s an activity in which one can participate only if one’s penis is as small as an infant’s and one’s need to prove one’s masculinity is as large as Rush Limbaugh’s ego. (I can’t even imagine what kind of penis envy motivates women to engage in this “sport.”)

I’m conflicted about hunting in general. I know how important it is to my state’s economy. I’ve heard about the need to protect crops and manage animal populations for their own good – to alleviate the suffering that comes with overpopulation and finite food sources. I understand that not everyone who eats meat can capture and process it themselves (this writer included) and I’ve read about hunters who’re committed to making use of as much of what they’ve brought down as possible and would sooner cut off their own digits than engage in a wasteful “sport” that gives all hunters a bad name. I just don’t have the desire or ability to end an animal’s life so that I can eat. If butchers and grocery stores didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t either.

But there’s a Great Lake-sized difference between hunting for food and hunting for trophies.

My partner’s ex-husband is a boastful hunter who felt it necessary to display the detached heads of dead animals in their living room against Anita’s wishes; the first thing I did after Anita and I began dating was to remove these despicable monuments to his warped sense of décor – this was the home of four young, animal-loving children in suburban Lansing, after all, not a testosterone-filled hunting lodge in the Wild, Wild West – and relegate them to Anita’s garage where they remained until he reclaimed them.

To kill a living being, no matter how majestic or endangered, just because you can smacks of immaturity and mental dysfunction to me. To stalk and violently end a wild animal’s life, one that’s confined and weaponless for your advantage, so you can leave behind a rotting carcass that once represented a breathing, feeling creature and return home with a Polaroid that proves your manhood...well, let’s just say your right to slaughter and desecrate big game for your own entertainment is “trumped” in my book by your obligation to leave this world in better shape than when you arrived.

I’ve never trophy-hunted. That doesn’t mean my opposition isn’t informed or credible. I’ve never stabbed a man, raped a woman or stolen a car either but I’m pretty sure my opposition to these things is still respectable. I have no need or desire to exercise my superiority over four-legged beings that can’t even shoot back.