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Show Fur flies over the differences between two animal lovers I just thought that I would take the opportunity to respond to Kelly Colobella's "Fur protester" letter to the editor printed Dec. 1 1 . Right off the bat she suggests that I need to do some research on the subject. First of all I would like to know what "research" she has done to back up her opinion. I hope that she has more experience than having watched an anti-fur television documentary. M 4 M 1 H r I On target w JOHN W. CANNON Outdoors Editor I feel that you have missed the point of my ire. In this argument I am not trying to justify the killing of animals for use by man. I will simply state that in our current society and culture it is considered legal and moral to do so. My point is simply that: first, if you are not a vegetarian you have no moral right to condemn animal consumers, including fur wearers; and second, if you are a vegetarian, you have no moral grounds to single out fur wearers but must condemn all animal consumers equally. What bothers me is mat you people have made it a point to single out fur wearers from the rest of the animal consumers. You claim that meat may be necessary but fur is not. To me this does not hold water. There are numerous nu-merous meat substitutes currently available. Vitamin-enriched Vitamin-enriched soybean protein and others sufficiently fill the need. The need to eat is no more important than the need to stay warm. Without either we would all die. If you anti-fur people are mostly hard core vegetarians, as you claim, why have you singled out fur-wearers? How come we never see protests of chicken farms on TV. Those miserable birds live their entire life with a handful of their relatives in a cage the size of a TV. They pull out each others feathers until they are all naked and bloody. The lives of our domestic livestock are overall much worse than any wild or pen-raised fur bearer. So why don't we see demonstrations at McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken? Where are the signs that say "Down with Egg McMuffins and Chicken McNuggets! Don't you know that some animal suffered suf-fered just so you could have a sandwich." I don't have anything against vegetarians and I have great respect for that type of lifestyle. I also love animals and do everything I can to preserve them and their habitat for future generations. However, I am also an animal consumer, as are most people in our society. I feel there is great hypocrisy hypoc-risy in singling out one specific type of animal consumer con-sumer while the others are ignored. Myself, I grew up in the woods of Ohio and began trapping and hunting fur bearers when I was nine years old. I sold the furs for quite a bit of money in those days. I have also raised a vast assortment of wild animals as pets, including three different raccoons, two timberwolves and a coyote. It's hard to describe the joy of being a youth and roaming endlessly through the wooded river bottoms with my best pal raccoon tagging along behind. I came to know, love and respect these wild animals through first-hand experience. I hunted and trapped them. I raised them. I lived with them in the woods. My experiences also include having worked on a fur farm where I raised and killed the animals for their fur. I have also reared numerous quantities of domestic dom-estic livestock, and I have spent time butchering these animals on the farm and at my father's meat packing plant. These are not sugar coated cartoon experiences or overdramatized television accounts, but real life. Thei e is no difference between the pain that a cow feels when a half inch diameter six-inch long spike is blasted into his skull or the mink that gets clubbed on the head. |
