The Travesty Continues

This photo of sport hunters and their trophy buffalo, taken somewhere in Idaho, brings on a quote by environmentalist Edward Abbey: "Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and aesthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one."

In his essay Blood Sport, Abbey writes, "Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about. Such a storm of conflicting emotions! . . . The killing is justified by the need and must be done in a spirit of respect, reverence, gratitude. To speak of "harvesting" other living creatures, whether deer or elk or birds of cottontail rabbits, as if they were no more than a crop, exposes the meanest, cruelest, most narrow and homocentric of possible human attitudes toward the life that surrounds us."

I present all this because they've started hunting buffalo again at Yellowstone National Park. Shameful waste of a coveted American icon, a special herd that should be preserved as much as possible. There is no need to hunt these animals.