On hunting and morality

Daniela Londner expects and deserves answers to her letters on hunting (December 11, 27).

"Has anyone of the Christian bird shooters heard of St Francis of Assisi?" she asked.

I, for one, have. I know as well that after this great saint's death, a controversy raged concerning the interpretation of the vow of poverty, or the refusal of all possessions. Some Franciscans, invoking the saint's authority, proposed to abolish not only private property but property, a proposal that would have lead to anarchy if adopted. In his essay on St Francis (Chap.10) G. K.Chesterton wrote: "It (this incident) shows that the Saints were sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will be found ...that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans".

Similarly it can be simply stated that the Franciscan attitude to birds is a peculiar one that is not shared by all humanity. If anything, Christian bird shooters are bound to act on the principles of Jesus Christ who was divine, and more than a saint and a poet. According to St Augustine (The City of God): "Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition for, judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit."

Ms Londner wrote: "Hunting was practised when homo sapiens needed food for survival." In fact such hunting is still practised e.g. by the Innuit tribes of the Yukon, and the Old Believers of Karelia. And, although gamebird shooting has evolved as a sport, gamebirds still feature as food at the table. There is nothing illegal about that.

"In 2007 shooting innocent, pretty birds is horrendous," wrote Ms Londner. Hunters do not shoot birds because they are "innocent" or "guilty". Lambs, too, are popularly perceived as both "innocent" and "pretty", and yet many people eat their meat, even in 2007. So did Jesus Christ and the Jews of his time.

Ms Londner mentions "you get beaten in certain countries for wearing a fur coat, etc". This merely shows that to the "animal rights" extremists the human person is less sacred than an animal. The God of the Bible evidently had different perceptions - Genesis (3: 21): "And the Lord God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and his wife and he clothed them".

Ms Londner refers to hunting as "viciousness". She is wrong. Even a staunch defender of animal rights, Bernard E. Rollin in Animal Rights And Human Morality writes (p 51): "Few cultures have understood animals better or have had more respect for them as ends in themselves than hunting cultures." Justin Alexander in The Ethics Of Hunting states: "Of all human practices that involve the death of animals, hunting is the most harmonious with nature."

As one who finds hunting morally acceptable, I choose to practise it. On the other hand, if Ms Londner judges hunting to be morally wrong, she chooses not to engage in it. But she has no right to make wild moral judgments about hunters, and to go further by criminalising everyone who hunts.