BY CAPTAIN PAUL WATSON
Some members of C.A.S.H. have asked about a few large
environmental organizations. This newsletter is dedicated to articles
regarding several.
Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And how he might, himself he did eclipse,
The Shepherd of the Ocean by Name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deep.
- Edmund Spenser
A.C.E. 1590
Captain Paul Watson’s letter of resignation from the National Board
of the Sierra Club has been freely distributed within the animal rights
community
and beyond.
C.A.S.H. asked Captain Watson to write something specifically for the C.A.S.H. Courier and he was kind enough to write
the following:
On April 21st, 2006 on John Muir’s 168th birthday, I resigned as a
National Director of the Sierra Club in protest of the Club’s sponsoring
of a contest entitled, “Why I like to Hunt.” The contest offered a
hunting trip to Alaska as the first prize.
This is now the 21st Century, yet the Sierra Club is encouraging
behavior today that John Muir condemned in the 19th Century. They are doing that
by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hunter outreach
programs.
Throughout his life, John Muir supported rights for wildlife. You can
read his philosophy in the pages of A Thousand Mile Walk, Mountains of
California, or The Cruise of the Corwin. His other writings also include
passages that defend wildlife and condemn the overlordship of men over
beast.
It was this philosophy that brought me to the Sierra Club in 1968 and
it was why I became a member. I joined an organization with a legacy and
a tradition of respect for wildlife and nature, an organization that
appealed to hikers, bird-watchers, naturalists and climbers, not those
who profess to love nature with a gun.
I joined the Sierra Club of John Muir, David Brower and Ansel Adams,
not the modern day aberration of Carl Pope.
In 1867, two years after the close of the Civil War, John Muir walked
from Indiana to Florida in order to observe both flora and fauna. Arriving in
Florida, he was shocked by the totally callous regard of people for
alligators: “Many good people believe that alligators were created by the Devil,
thus accounting for their all-consuming appetite and ugliness. But doubtless
these creatures are happy and fill the place assigned them by the great
Creator of us all. Fierce and cruel they appear to us, but beautiful in
the eyes of god. They, also, are his children, for He hears their cries,
cares for them tenderly, and provides their daily bread.”
Muir suggested that all creatures are brothers and equal in the eyes
of their creator. Several pages later in A Thousand Mile Walk, Muir
expresses his views on man’s domination over the animal world even more
strongly:
“Let a Christian hunter go to the Lord’s woods and kill his well-kept
beasts, or wild Indians, and it is well; but let an enterprising
specimen of these proper, predestined victims go to houses and fields
and kill the most worthless person of the vertical godlike killers, —oh!
that is horribly unorthodox, and on the part of the Indians, atrocious
murder!
Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of
civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild
beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”
In the latter part of the 1800s, Muir wrote: “Now, it never seems to
occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature’s object in making
animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each
one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why
should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit
of creation?
And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is
not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?
The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be
incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells
beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.”
John Muir defended rights for animals. He believed that not only did
wildlife have an equal right to live with humans on this planet but that it had a
great deal to teach us if we would only attempt to open up channels of communication.
What is amazing is that Muir lived at a time when there were far
fewer people and many more animals and much more wilderness, yet he had the vision to see the consequences of human arrogance. He was advocating rights for animals and for wilderness a century before these ideas evolved into a movement.
Muir recalled a time when he encountered sheep hunters during a hike
up Mount Shasta where he observed a kill:
He wrote:
“We went up to the ewe, She was still breathing, but helpless. Her eye
was remarkably mild and gentle, and called out sympathy as if she were
human. Poor woman-sheep!”
He also wrote: Hunters slaughter wildlife without any thought of the
interdependence of all life. On board the Corwin, white hunters
approached three polar bears valiantly trying to make an escape over the ice-floes:
“The first one overtaken was killed instantly at the second shot,
which passed through the brain. The other two were fired at by five fun, fur,
and fame seekers, with heavy breech-loading rifles, about forty times ere
they were killed. From four to six bullets passed through their necks
and shoulders before the last through the brain put an end to their
agony... It was prolonged, bloody agony, as clumsily and heartlessly
inflicted as it could well be, except in the case of the first, which
never knew what hurt him.”
Shortly afterwards the bodies were hoisted aboard the ship and
skinned to be taken home “to show angelic sweethearts the evidence of pluck and
daring.”
Similar procedures were carried out with walruses by the great white
hunters from San Francisco: “These magnificent animals,” Muir writes in
the Cruise of the Corwin “ are killed often times for their tusks alone,
like buffaloes for their tongues, ostriches for their feathers, or for
mere sport and exercise. In nothing does man, with his grand notions of
heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more
clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts. From the shepherd
with his lambs to the red handed hunter, it is the same; no recognition
of rights - only murder in one form or another.”
This voyage to the Arctic in 1881 taught Muir much about his fellow
man.
Muir’s meetings with Theodore Roosevelt led to the creation of the
National Parks in the United States, but this did not prevent Muir from
engaging in lively debates with Roosevelt over the ethics of hunting,
even calling Roosevelt’s love of trophy hunting “childish.”
Muir openly referred to hunting as the “murder business.”
Yet the Sierra Club founded by John Muir today features pictures of
smiling Sierra Club staff posing with their recently slaughtered trophy animals.
http://www.sierraclub.org/huntingfishing/whoweare.asp
I think it is incredibly disrespectful for Carl Pope and the staff of
the Sierra Club to use the web pages of the Club as a gloat and boast statement for
their conquests over wildlife. Are these people so emotionally inadequate or
immature that they need to flaunt their perversion to the entire Sierra
Club membership? Do we really need to see them posing with big smiles with
freshly slaughtered animals? What purpose does this page serve other
than as a perverse vanity page? Is the object to recruit hunters and
turn off animal lovers?
And to actually host a contest to promote hunting with an all expense
lethal kill thrill in Alaska as a prize, this is akin to spitting on
John Muir’s grave.
The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir to respect wilderness and to
honor nature. It is amazingly hypocritical for the Sierra Club to be
posting this pro-slaughter blasphemy on the same website where the words
of John Muir proclaim that hunting is the “murder business.” It shows
their antipathy for the sentiment and will of the noble founder.
