Ryan outfits 10 yr old daughter with deer-hunting gear (gave her rifle as gift at age 9)

[marions ghost]

257. I'm sure you have all the numbers you need

where I live, I call 'em "shooters"--they're not really hunting to eat anything. They just go around in the woods shooting. I saw one raise his gun on an owl. I yelled out and he ran off. All dressed up in camo to shoot an owl...

Time to evolve further...blowing away wild animals for sport isn't evolutionarily advantageous anymore. And we need to ratchet back ye olde predator/prey mentality. It's not helping us these days. You ignore my point about how this sadistic mentality plays into what we're seeing in politics, especially right wing politics.

I think MOST people calling themselves hunters today do it as sport. There are some people who still hunt for needed food, but that's declining.

Dick Cheney--How many Pheasants and Quail did you kill today? ----------------------------------------------------

"Unlike Cheney's 2003 trip to Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, Pa., in which he killed 70 pheasants and an undisclosed number of ducks (his hunting party killed 417 pheasants), staff at the Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club remained tight-lipped about the take." ....

"Birds raised for canned hunts at gun clubs and in state "recreational" areas are grown in packed pens -- think factory farmed chickens -- and fitted with goggles so they won't peck each other to death from the crowding.

When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can barely walk or fly -- or see, thanks to the goggles. They don't know how to forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to "fly" enough to be shot.

Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals, which offer no resistance, is like having sex with a blow-up doll.

But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the 10 percent decline in hunters seen in the United States since the late '90s -- from 14 million to about 12.5 million -- coincides exactly with the debut of impotence drugs like Viagra.

Still for the veep to pursue his addiction to the "programmed massacre of scores of tame, pen-raised birds" despite all the "negative publicity it has generated for him" suggests a deep psychological disorder, writes Gerald Schiller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette .

Especially since criminologists have long recognized that premeditated, sadistic treatment of animals is a strong predictor of criminal and homicidal violence.

Sociopaths Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck were both big on animal cruelty. And they weren't running foreign policy.

http://www.alternet.org/story/67663/dick_cheney%27s_sadistic_passion_for_shooting_tame_animals