We Can't Let Guns Define Us
Every year, thousands upon thousands of coyotes, bobcats, foxes, and other wild animals are massacred in wildlife killing contests on both public and private lands across the United States. As journalist Kim Frank details in the Journal’s Summer 2022 cover story, “Blood Sport,” these animals are often lured towards hunters using high-tech equipment, summarily gunned down with high-powered rifles, then counted and weighed by contest organizers, who offer their killers tens of thousands of dollars in cash or other prizes like firearms. The scale of the killing is stomach-churning.
Though I’ve known about these contests for some time now — pretty much since I started working with the Journal back in 2013 — I still find the indiscriminate killing and glorification of violence embedded in the sport shocking. What I find less shocking, however, is that these contests are, according to the Humane Society, unique to the United States.
That’s because our country holds several other unfortunate distinctions when it comes to violence and guns: the highest per capita gun-ownership rate in the world by far, the only country with more guns than people, and the highest number of gun-caused deaths of any other wealthy country. And as we’ve been painfully reminded these past several weeks following the deadly shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, and a hospital in Tulsa, OK, aside from conflict zones, we have the highest rate of mass shootings as well.
America’s gun culture — which causes so much unbearable loss of life — is deeply ingrained in our society and unparalleled on a global scale.
Amid all the loss, I find some comfort in the knowledge that there are people keeping up the fight to reshape our country’s relationship with guns, from the wildlife advocates pushing to end killing contests to the activists working for commonsense gun control laws. I am thankful for their tireless, and heart-wrenching, work.
Zoe Loftus-Farren
Managing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: David Clark
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