Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby

 

Hunter 1

I am a hunter. I love hunting. Killing animals makes me feel tremendous relief--relief so huge and bright it feels like joy. It's the only time in my life I feel totally in control and unafraid.

I suppose other people would think it was sick or pathetic that watching an animal die should be so soothing for me, but I think I'm better than the others for two reasons.

First, unlike other hunters I don't kill because it's thrilling or what they call "fun. Second, I am honest about my feelings.

Look at this picture. Look at the degree of intimacy I have achieved here with this wild creature. Look at how I am able to cradle its enormous head in my lap. This is true, filial love.

I don't kid myself by thinking that it isn't wrong. Of course it is! The animal was alive, had probably a family or a mate. It made discriminations, had preferences. Maybe it liked watercress or to get high off rotten apples.

Now its dead because of my need for closeness. I know it's wrong. A lot of things are wrong.

At least this is a wrong committed for the right reasons.


Hunter 2

I love children. We all love children. We love them not because they are good, which they are not, but because unlike adults, they contain the potential to become good.

They stand for the possibility of moral education, and consequently, our own moral redemption. If one brings a child into the light of decency. One has, in some small measure, compensated for one's own slide into degenerate, greedy perversion.


Hunter 4

Often people accuse me of being cynical. I believe I'm one of the least cynical people I know. I'm an optimist. I believe the earth will come to good. I'm sure that life on this planet will outlive our species, which you have to admit is a blight. New organisms will evolve and the song of the universe will continue, like a round. The verse about us will be over soon and things will get better.


Hunter 5

My children and love to go to the zoo. Zoos, like hunting, are symbols of the human longing for animal closeness. What the kids and I would really like, though, but which is for some reason seen as not ethical, is a zoo in which all the animals were heavily tranquilized--where we could go into their enclosures and lie down among them; caress them. I don't understand why that should be forbidden to us. Why is it acceptable practice to imprison animals, and to shoot them, in order to be close to them, but unacceptable to calm their savagery with the same drugs we use to calm our own savagery?