Dick Cheney's idea of fun

Every once in awhile, the well-crafted images inadvertently fall away, and you can’t help but see the true character of the men who have taken control of America. So it was this weekend, when the details of Dick Cheney’s hunting trip emerged, after he became only the second Vice President (after Aaron Burr) to shoot another man while in office:

Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."  

That from the Humane Society of the United States, which has written incisively on the relationships between these kind of murderous hunting clubs and the Republican Party elite.

Matthew Scully is that rare public conservative whose religious values actually seem heartfelt, and actually appear to bring out his better angels. In his book Dominion, he has written broadly and passionately on how he believes his faith enjoins him to treat his fellow creatures -- from the factory farm to Dick Cheney’s “shooting fields.” While I come to these issues from a secular perspective, I admire his views, and recommend them to you.

When we look back and wonder how ordinary people could have tolerated -- or even justified -- slavery, we need only look to the way we tolerate and justify the most appalling forms of animal cruelty, done in the name of savage pleasure and pure profit, without even the justifications of scientific research.