I suggest we respond to this forcefully but politely. I also suggest we DON'T print our responses here; we're betraying our hand to the opposition too often when we do that.
Just a simple "I replied" will give us all an indication of what sort of support we have.
Bruce
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From the West Australian newspaper; Thursday 16 February 2006
Columnist Andre Malan
Hearts aquiver when Cheney shoots quail
Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful men on earth. Only a heartbeat away from the presidency, he is a flag bearer for the reigning neo-conservative hawks in the US and his sway has helped send nations to war.
How pathetic—and worrying—to learn that an important and influential figure like that gets his kicks from blasting the life out of defenceless little birds he has no intention of eating.
Last Saturday, Mr Cheney was out hunting quail with a party including a friend of his, Harry Whittington, when he accidentally sprayed the 78-year-old Texan lawyer in the face, neck and chest with birdshot. Mr Whittington has since suffered a heart attack caused by a piece of lead lodged in his heart.
Incredibly, the fact that the Vice-President of the US had shot and seriously injured a person was not disclosed to the news media for almost 24 hours and police did not get around to interviewing Mr Cheney or other members of the hunting party until the day after the shooting. It also transpired that Mr Cheney and Mr Whittington had been hunting illegally, without the required game bird stamps on their shooting licences.
The incident has provided instant fodder for headline writers, comics and bloggers who have tied their quips in with Mr Cheney’s political reputation.
The Herald in Scotland wrote, “Cheney Bags a Lawyer”, while the Sydney Morning Herald headlined its online story “Cheney Hunts Quail and Everyone Else Ducks”.
Late-night TV comic David Letterman announced: “Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction. It’s Dick Cheney”.
“We can’t get Bin Laden,” he added, “but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney”.
Officially, it appears that no blame can be attached to Mr Cheney for the shooting and the accident was the fault of Mr Whittington, who broke the accepted rules and etiquette of hunting parties by moving out of the line to retrieve a downed bird and copped it from the vice-presidential shotgun.
Of more concern than that, though, is the revelation that Mr Cheney willingly indulges in a cowardly and unsavoury activity like quail shooting, presumably without feeling any shame. Put another way, do we really want to entrust the running of the world’s only superpower to people with souls so bleak that they feel no shame in killing animals just for the hell of it?
It is certainly not sport. Sport is an even contest between well matched competitors in which skill and courage help one to prevail over the other. Bird shooting, even more than fox hunting, is an ugly, one-sided activity in which powerful weapons are used to destroy the lives of defenceless creatures.
Even if you discount the mindless killing of birds and the risk of killing or injuring your fellow hunters, shooting birds of any sort inevitably results in a number of wounded birds being made to suffer and in some non-game birds and protected species becoming “collateral damage”, as Mr Cheney would probably describe it.
Fortunately quail and duck shooting is in rapid decline in Australia. WA was the first State to ban it and NSW and Queensland have since followed suit. In other States the number of hunters has been drastically reduced by public awareness campaigns.
When the WA government banned recreational duck shooting in 1990, then-premier Carmen Lawrence declared that the community had reached a stage of enlightenment where it could no longer accept the institutionalised killing of birds for recreation.
Dare we hope that the US will soon reach a similar state of enlightenment?
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