{"id":17041,"date":"2015-08-04T11:34:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T18:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17041"},"modified":"2015-08-04T11:34:01","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T18:34:01","slug":"tuesday-bag-o-original-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17041","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Bag o’ Original Sin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"originalI said I wasn’t going to pile on that lion-killing dentist, but the more I learn about him<\/a> the more I want to. Sadly, he’s but the tip of an\u00a0iceberg: big game trophy hunting is\u00a0not just a\u00a0subculture but an industry. We can continue to single out clueless rich assholes foolish enough to post photos of their kills on social media, or we can get organized and go after\u00a0the industry itself.<\/p>\n

Some airlines are already on it<\/a>: Delta, United, and American have\u00a0announced bans\u00a0on shipping big game trophies. It’s probably impossible to prevent US citizens from going on hunting\u00a0safaris overseas, but we can\u00a0pressure congress and the president to\u00a0follow the airlines’ lead and outlaw the importation of\u00a0big game pelts, heads, tusks, and horns\u00a0from Africa and\u00a0other parts of the world. If the USA does\u00a0it, other nations may follow. If hunters can’t bring their trophies home,\u00a0it might slow or even stop the slaughter of endangered animals. Yeah, call me an optimist. I can take it.<\/p>\n

I’ve been following the national trophy hunting discussion in the news and on social media, and one thing I’ve noticed … you have too, I’ll bet … is that even as\u00a0more and more of us\u00a0get\u00a0behind #BlackLivesMatter<\/a>, #AnimalLivesMatter<\/a>\u00a0trumps everything. We condemn cops who, with little or no\u00a0provocation, kill\u00a0unarmed black men, women, and children, but few of us post\u00a0death threats against those cops, and when we do we hide our tracks by posting anonymously. When Cecil the lion was killed, our death threats, along with gruesome and detailed proposals on how to torture the dentist\u00a0first,\u00a0flooded the internet. None of us bothered to disguise our names.<\/p>\n

Why the difference? A friend passed along\u00a0a link to a\u00a0New York Times opinion column<\/a> on the discrepancy between our feelings about\u00a0the killing of people and\u00a0the killing of animals.\u00a0One line jumped out at me: “Animals are not stained by original sin.”<\/p>\n

Wow. I hadn’t consciously thought about\u00a0original sin in like, forever, but apparently the concept is deeply embedded in\u00a0my values and beliefs, because my instant reaction to that statement was “yes, exactly.” Yes, exactly: animals are innocent, we are not.<\/p>\n

I tell people I’m politically liberal but personally and socially conservative. More conservative than I knew, apparently. I’m sorry it took an asshole dentist killing an innocent lion to make me take a harder look at\u00a0my beliefs and values. I’ll try to make up for it by writing a letter to my congressman, proposing a ban on big game trophy importation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend passed along a link to a New York Times opinion column on the discrepancy between our feelings about the killing of people and the killing of animals. One line jumped out at me: “Animals are not stained by original sin.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,2,827,6],"tags":[1930,1929,1931],"class_list":["post-17041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-personal","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-animallivesmatter","tag-blacklivesmatter","tag-original-sin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17041"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17056,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041\/revisions\/17056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}