Every day I try to read the Dickinson Press newspaper stories on the internet.  Just now, I read a short article by columnist Rob Port titled “It’s Just An Animal”.

I was shocked at the title of this article, what Rob Port had to say, and what this article was about.  Apparently, a 12 year old girl from Fargo named Sylvia Peach Leiviska, shot and killed a 600 lb wildebeest on a game preserve in South Africa.

Everything about this sickens and astonishes me.  I can not understand, that people believe that because we have higher intelligence than other animals, that we have the right to kill them.  If this kind of thinking is O.K., sound, and logical, it should be acceptable to kill stupid people, developmentally disabled people, mentally disabled people, mentally ill people, drug addicted people, and unproductive people.

Do people even realize, that there is a whole spectrum of intelligence among people, and if it ever came to it being acceptable for intelligent people to kill less intelligent people, many of you, many of us, would find out that we were deemed killable?

Or, do people even realize, that there are more advanced, more intelligent beings in the Universe, and if it is O.K. for more intelligent beings to kill and harvest the less intelligent beings, that this means us?

Yes, I understand that if I eat animal meat, that an animal was killed for it.  I wish that I never would have started out in life eating animal meat, and that there was an equal or better substitute for the food value of animal meat.

If I had to personally shoot and butcher cows and pigs in order to get meat, I would eat a lot less meat, maybe none at all.  I don’t even like to fish very much anymore, and when I do, I release the fish right away.

Even when I was a kid, but especially as I grew older, I could see that all animals, including us humans, have a similar life.  We start out as fumbling infants, and spend our entire lives trying to get food, water, make a shelter, stay warm and dry, obtain resources that we need, and keep ourselves and our family safe.

Us humans, with our language, writing, science, technology, and manufacturing, can produce water resistant clothing, very insulated clothing, high magnification spotting scopes, long range accurate rifles with high magnification scopes, off-road hunting buggies and four-wheelers, large four-door four-wheel-drive 500 horsepower off-road trucks, and we use all of this to shoot an animal, that doesn’t have anything, and then celebrate this like it was a personal victory?

The domestic cattle that we raise for food, if I had to do it, or for whoever has to do it, I would walk right up to it and shoot it in the head as quickly as possible, so that the animal would not experience being terrorized, it would just be dead.  And I sure as hell would not be proud of it, and wanting to have my picture taken.

No animal, not even Rob Port, would like being in an enclosed game preserve, having lived through the experience before of tourists coming to try to hunt and shoot them, knowing that they are captive and that it is only a matter of time before they are killed.

Maybe one night, on a desolate stretch of highway, some aliens will stop Rob Port’s car, chase him around through the woods, taser him, have their young take a photograph beside his immobilized body, and then roast him on a spit alive, because that’s the most tasty way to do it.  It would be all in fun and sport for the aliens, but not for Rob, but he doesn’t really feel anything, because he’s not as evolved as the aliens, as they are accustomed to saying.