Quotes Concerning Hunting

(18 Quotations)

• Edward Abbey - "Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsmen grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one."

• Margaret Brooke-Williams (Clinical Psychologist) - "Hunters are seeking reassurance of their sexuality. The feeling of power that hunting brings temporarily alleviates this sexual uneasiness."

• Dr. John D. Copp (Psychologist) - "They [hunters] described the state immediately following a kill as [. . .] a kind of high. This heightened sense of arousal seemed to have a particularly pronounced effect among the younger hunters."

• Dr. John D. Copp (The American Hunting Myth) - "Hunters reported feelings of great elation after shooting a duck."

• Jacques Cousteau (Oceanographer) - "The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature...We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters...and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult."

• James Anthony Froude (Oceana, 1886) – "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.”

• Tenzin Gyatso - "Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality."

• Grace Knole (Medieval scholar; The James Joyce Murderers) – I expect after you have many times seen a deer or woodchuck blown to bits, the thought of a human being blown to bits is that much less impossible to conceive.”

• Joseph Wood Krutch – "When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”

• Joseph Wood Krutch (The Great Chain of Life) - "Killing for ‘sport’ is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself [. . .] The killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying “Something which wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps joy in the universe. I am the spirit that Denies."

• Marv Levy (professional football coach) – "When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He (the bird) was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.”

• Karl Menninger (famous psychiatrist) - "Sadism may take a socially accepted form ... I have in mind, for example, grouse shooting, fox hunting, duck hunting, deer stalking [. . .] and other varieties of so-called 'sport' while not identical to the horse-whipping pattern [. . .] these all represent the destructive and cruel energies of man directed toward more helpless creatures."

• Tom Regan - "The creed of maximum sustainable yield unmasks the rhetoric about "humane service" to animals. It must be a perverse distortion of the ideal of humane service to accept or engage in practices the explicit goal of which is to insure that there will be a larger, rather than a smaller, number of animals to kill! With "humane friends" like that, wild animals certainly do not need any enemies."

• Paul Rodriguez – "Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game.”

• George Bernard Shaw - "When a man wants to murder a tiger it is called a sport, when the tiger wants to murder him it is called ferocity."

• Marjorie Spiegel (As quoted in The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery) - "In the annual Canadian harp seal slaughter, hunters have been filmed wielding screaming baby seals like clubs to attack the pups’ own mothers, before smashing the young pups to death on the ice."

• Henry David Thoreau (Essayist, Poet) - "The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."

• P.G. Wodehouse – "The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun."