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GIORDANO: Healey’s Sunday Hunting Pledge Should Be Put Out Of Its Misery
By Alice Giordano
Oh for joy. Gov. Maura Healey wants to bring more terror to the woods of Massachusetts by using the lure of Sunday hunting to draw blaze orange-clad goons that large land owners in northern New England like myself have to contend with year after year.
She has already bored the progressive populace of one of the bluest states in the country with the proverbial empty rhetoric of how hunting humanely “manages” wildlife.
Wildlife management, to anyone who hasn’t taken a bonehead pill, is just a euphemistic phrase for killing animals. In the words of Miranda Priestly “that’s all.” A debate on its justifications is beside the point.
To boot, never mind that Healey hasn’t embraced similar “compassion” when it comes to the human populations starving on the streets of Boston or the underpasses of Worcester.
Hypocrisy is always at its stunning worst when people look for ways to sugarcoat scourging animals.
The mere fact that hunters call themselves sportsmen is not only laughable but a big giant, in-your-face clue of what hunting is to those who do it.
Of the few things I missed about my native state of Massachusetts since leaving it decades ago, was its kindness to animals.
And now, the state’s heralded first-in-the-nation lesbian governor is selling out to a bunch of mostly heterosexual white men who turned the Second Amendment into a billion dollar industry dedicated to “the fun” of it all.
Maybe saying it out loud will help: The right to bear arms does not equal a right to kill animals.
Not even Maine, where hunting is often as much a part of a public school’s core curriculum as reading, writing, arithmetic , has allowed hunters to spill the blood of an animal across the outdoor lure of Autumn leaves on a tranquil Sunday morning.
Apparently, a woman known — and celebrated — to buck trends suddenly wants to be like all the other states that have turned life into a ghastly version of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday song for wildlife.
I find it highly unlikely that Massachusetts, the land of equity and one of the top ten most vegan states in the U.S., really wants to take the only day of rest away from an animal after it endured six days of exhausting hell from being relentlessly tracked, chased, and traumatized.
In the state that covets its famous Walden Pond, it will be a contradiction to say the least to add another agonizing day for a hunted animal who can’t even get a sip of water from a pond because it is abounded by an arsenal of deer stands, artificial attractants, and cellular trail cameras — all in addition to the long range scopes, high power rifles, vision optics, range finders, and GPS trackers — toted by Healey’s “economic boons.”
It’s like putting a razor blade as the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks and selling it as a way to teach young women and men how to shave.
Biting-at-the bit hunters who can’t kill on Sunday up north will eagerly sojourn down to Massachusetts, despite their incessantly professed “masshole” disdain for its residents.
They will not bring their love for the ivy league halls of Harvard, admiration for Little Women’s Louisa May Alcott, nor any appreciation for the state’s uber eco-friendly first-of-its-kind private waste site cleanup program in the nation.
I have spent hundreds of dollars on No Hunting signs — shot up, ripped down, with piles of human defecation around them. One hunter even decided to cut off the legs of a deer and stake them in the ground in protest of my exercising my right to prohibit hunting on land I pay taxes on.
Back on Sept. 9, 1991, Lorraine Tedeschi, founder of the Non-Hunters Alliance of Maine, was found shot to death in her truck in the woods. She was just 40 years old. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide even though Lorraine was shot twice.
She was making headway taming the beastly behavior of hunters with her campaign for reverse posting in the hunting mecca of a state. It would have relieved Maine property owners of the burden to post their land against hunting by replacing it with a law that would allow hunting only on land expressly posted as permitting it.
It was to say conservatively, met with wild protest from hunters.
It was just yet more proof that hunting is an ugly “sport.” To those who defend it — keep a mirror handy when you try to character assassinate someone who doesn’t have the beheaded head of a dead animal hanging over their living room couch.
And this isn’t about carnistic dietary choices. It’s been 146 years since Laura Ingalls faced a brutal winter with no food.
During this past hunting season, we came across a trembling young deer struggling to stammer to its feet. She had a gaping hole from a bullet that ripped through her side and was so exhausted that all she had left in her was to plead for mercy with her big brown eyes.
It was late and it was raining and judging by the thickened mix of blood and mud along her side, it was clear she had been dragging herself in desperate search for a safe place that no longer existed in her world.
My 18-year old daughter, who can be stoic sometimes, ruefully remarked “I never realized how magical they are,” surprising even herself with how hypnotically awestruck she was by the deer’s gentle elegance, even as it lay critically wounded struggling with unbearable fear.
Meanwhile, Healey, who is one of the most anti-gun governors in the country, declared in promoting her quest to bring Sunday hunting to Massachusetts:
“It’s time we update our laws to reflect today’s needs.”
All I can think is Healey got herself into some brown-brown — a euphoric, psychotic-inducing mixture of cocaine and smokeless gunpowder that led to drug abuse by soldiers in The Civil War.
Because — really — just exactly whose needs is she talking about?
Alice Giordano, a pro-Second Amendment staunch vegan, is a writer for Newsmax Magazine. She is a former news correspondent for The Boston Globe, The Associated Press, conservative commentator for Newsweek’s Voice of the Day, and senior political correspondent for The Epoch Times. She has been a contributor to a variety of media outlets including The New York Times, The American Thinker, and The Federalist.
