Elk "Calf Production" Down? Kill More Elk!

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-09-29 07:17:00 UTC
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Welcome to the latest episode of Hunting and Wildlife "Management" Logic! (See WTF? 101 here, and try using a browser other than IE if the long comment thread is making it difficult to open the page.) Today we head to South Dakota's Custer State Park, where elk numbers are dropping rapidly; the elk are giving birth to only half as many calves as usual.

The "management goal" is 750 elk, yet there are only around 450 of the animals left. But don't worry, hunters: the state of South Dakota still absolutely encourages you to go out there and get yourself a permit and a "trophy" kill; there are still bulls out there just waiting to be killed, and all the state asks is that you quickly stick a needle in the dying animal and get a blood sample after you shoot him.

I know it will be inconvenient to have to delay your whooping and hollering and self-congratulations for gunning down a large, beautiful animal to get the sample, but you see, it's for the greater good. The sooner biologists can figure out why the calf numbers are down, the better for you -- I mean whom are you going to gun down in future years if not enough calves are being born? This year's babies are a future year's wall adornment, right?

But hey, don't think of them as babies. The state of South Dakota and your Rapid City newspaper sure don't. They're a "crop"! And they don't even go through the process of birth or have mothers apparently: the process is "calf production," silly. Mothers are actually just machines, babies are just a crop, and the forest is merely a factory. And they're all here for the sole grand purpose of providing you, brave hunter with a gun, the incomparable joy of killing -- oh, I'm sorry, harvesting.

</sarcasm>

Sigh. Before ending this post, I feel compelled to point out again that this logic and perspective is not limited to hunting. That last paragraph describes exactly how we humans treat (and how agribusiness talks about) farmed animals as well. Mother cows, sows, hens, ewes, and more are treated like mere machines, their babies treated like mere commodities, and their mother-child bonds treated as if they don't exist, with all of them -- all of them -- ultimately being killed not for necessity, but for pleasure, not because we have to eat them, their children, their milk, and their eggs, but because we choose to. Whether the person is wielding* a gun or a fork, whether the animals are bull elks and elk calves or dairy cows and veal calves or mother sows and piglets, the animals' experiences of suffering and death are the same.

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Photo (of a Utah elk killed) uploaded by Flickr user Jared

*Much thanks to reader and dedicated advocate Olivia for catching that originally I wrote "yielding" where I meant "wielding." :)

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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