The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television where this week we examine the heartless and unconscionable practice of hunting wildlife.

The US-based non-profit organization, In Defense of Animals’ (IDA’s) stated mission is “to end animal exploitation, cruelty, and abuse by protecting and advocating for the rights, welfare, and habitats of animals, as well as to raise their status beyond mere property, commodities, or things.” Since 1983 this group has been a leader in animal protection, including in the area of halting the murder of wildlife.

Over the years In Defense of Animals has stopped bow hunting of the Tule Elk and killing of peacocks at Point Reyes National Seashore, a park in California, USA, halted a planned aerial killing of wolves in Alaska, USA, prevented a buffalo hunt from going forward in New Mexico, USA, caused the cancellation of a hunting competition that would have meant the deaths of up to 1,000 bobcats, coyotes, cougars, and foxes in a single weekend in Arizona, USA, and successfully halted a bear hunt in New Jersey, USA.

Today’s program features excerpts from an episode of the In Defense of Animals-produced television series “Undercover TV” entitled “What’s Wrong With Hunting?”

Undercover TV is hosted by Mr. Kenneth G. Williams, a vegan professional body builder from the United States and a spokesperson for In Defense of Animals’s veganism campaign. This superb athlete made sports history in 2004, when he won third place at the prestigious Natural Olympia bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, USA and became the first vegan bodybuilding champion in the United States.

Let us now watch selected segments from “What’s Wrong With Hunting?”

Welcome to Undercover TV. Today we have a special presentation of the video, “What’s Wrong With Hunting?” This video exposes the animal cruelty that occurs during hunting. Some of the images are graphic and viewer discretion is advised.

Hi, I’m Marv Levy. I’ve often been asked if hunting is a sport since I engage in what I consider to be a sport also. During the course of this video, I’d like to address that subject. What’s Wrong With Hunting?

Hey angel, consider…

It is not right to go out and kill an animal purely for the sport of it.

These animals swim. They play. They breathe. They have young, they love. How can you kill that? How can you kill it?

So why don’t you go hiking? Why don’t you go camping? Why don’t you go out and have fun and track animals but not kill them, not take the gun?

You believe in the ten commandments right? One of those is “Thou shall not kill.”

And all the hunters said that they enjoy nature and they enjoy wildlife. Well, how are we supposed to enjoy nature and wildlife in the future if we kill it all?

Well, what makes a sport is one, first and foremost, the sides are even. You’re playing on a level playing field. The people participating in it want to do it, both sides of the line of scrimmage.

Well, I’ve often heard people saying, “You know, football’s a violent game so how is that different from hunting?” Well, it’s different in any number of ways. First of all, as I said before, the participants want to be in it. They’re conditioned for it and it’s a game. And when it’s over, if you’re in good condition, your chances of walking off in good shape are excellent and you play again another day. Only the hunter has the chance of walking off the hunting field healthy. The animal is dead forever.

I think a sport is two teams competing for the same thing – to win and to be number one. And that’s what everybody in professional sports is striving to be - the best and to be number one. As far as hunting, to kill an animal, how can you consider that being number one when you killed something?

I don’t consider hunting a sport, I consider it murder.

I think people see change. Other people don’t want to see it and they see that as being a part of their heritage. People like me are insisting that they stop. And they say, “Well, all animals eat other animals. That’s natural, that’s a way of life. So why shouldn’t we?” And I answer with a simple statement, “We’re the only animal that has a choice.”

Hunters represent only six percent of Americans, yet they control almost 100% of our wildlife.

And a lot of people support hunting because they’ve been conditioned to hear the hunter’s myths, of “Oh, we’ve got to hunt or the deer are going to starve and overpopulate.” And you know, “We have to hunt to survive and it’s a tradition.” But as people start to explore those issues, you’re going to have more people in the camp of compassion than thinking, bringing a violent end to an animal as something positive.

The problem is the average person hears the sound bite from the hunter, “Deer are overpopulated and are going to starve to death if we don’t go out and kill them.” And in reality, the explanations that wildlife biologists need to give, the responsible ones, take a lot more time than appear in a sound bite on the ten o’clock news.

Sometimes what people mean when they say “overpopulation” is that there are too many animals on a given piece of land. But most often what they mean by overpopulation is they don’t like the impact a particular animal is having on their land, their home, their property. Hunting leads to overpopulation and it sounds counter-intuitive, but the way it works is when you hunt a population, what you do, you end up reducing it temporarily.

And all wildlife populations have a reproduction response based on the available food resources. So when they have more food, they tend to have more offspring, and they breed at an earlier age. When they have less food, they tend to not breed so quickly, they tend to have less offspring and sometimes they even re-absorb fetuses when times are very hard.

So what happens after hunting seasons, suddenly the remaining animals have more food, they tend to have more offspring the following spring and suddenly the population rebounds and you’ve actually triggered growth in the populations because of hunting.

Say you have a population of 10 deer, and normally you’d have five females and five males in this population, a very simplistic model. So say it was a good year, the highest number of fawns that could be born in that population of ten, if there were five females, would be 10 offspring, which would be assuming that every one of those females was breeding age and had twins.

But say then you turned to a hunted population, again you have a population of 10. But in that population, so many males have been taken out that you have nine females for every male. So in that population, that one male can mate with all nine females and have as much as eighteen fawns, which is a lot more than in the normal un-hunted population.

The idea that if we don’t hunt them they’re going to starve, is based on some faulty assumptions, because first of all, we don’t even know how many deer might starve in a given winter. We don’t know that the ones we’re taking out are necessarily the ones that would have starved. And again I think it’s always best to let nature take its course. The ones that will starve will be the ones that are less fit to get through the winter. And the one’s that remain are going to be the ones that are better fit and should be passing on their genes.

It’s hypocritical for state wildlife agencies to use the deer-vehicle collision argument to support hunting because the agency, their entire goal is to literally grow more wildlife for hunters to shoot. They use various techniques to do that. They’ll manipulate the sex ratio of the species in question, most cases white-tailed deer. They will modify the habitat to increase productivity in the deer population.

So there are more deer out there and they’re reproducing more and more each year. So there’s more animals for the hunters to shoot. To do that on one hand, but then to come out and say, “We need to shoot these deer because there’s too many that are hitting cars, or cars are hitting too many,” is extremely hypocritical because they’re creating the situation.

The bison is a perfect example of a species that we nearly hunted to extinction. These animals were plentiful across North America until the US government decided to have an all-out war against the bison. And they are very few in number today; most of them who still survive are in Yellowstone National Park, where they are safe from hunting.

But unfortunately if they leave that park and walk into the state of Montana (USA) or Wyoming (USA), they’re gunned down. You know it’s just a perfect example of an animal that is killed for no other reason than a trophy. Someone wants to take home their head and hang it over a fireplace.

These are mallard ducks and there are some geese behind us as well. And these and many other types of waterfowl are hunted very frequently. There are about six million ducks that are killed every year in the US by hunters.

We’ve got foxes here in this pen, and luckily for these foxes they’re safe here at the Fund for Animals Sanctuary. But in the wild, foxes are one of the few species that are both hunted and trapped. They’re allowed to be killed both with guns or with steel-jaw leghold traps or snares or other types of traps. In some states, there are no bag limits and no season dates on foxes. They’re allowed to kill them year round with absolutely no regulations.

Hunting is barbaric and wrong. The animals that are preyed upon by the hunters are gentle and want nothing but peace for themselves and their families. Let humanity now turn a new page and halt hunting permanently. Let us also embrace the loving, caring and nourishing organic vegan lifestyle as it is the best way to ensure a harmonious world where all beings are equal.

Many thanks In Defense of Animals as well as Kenneth Williams and all others appearing in this video for sincerely seeking an end to the senseless slaughter of our innocent animal co-inhabitants.

Through our life-affirming collective efforts, may all beings soon live in peace and harmony on our shared Earth.

For more details on In Defense of Animals,
please visit www.IDAUSA.org
A DVD of Undercover TV episodes is available at the same website

Thank you for your company on today’s program. Please join us next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty for further excerpts from “What’s Wrong With Hunting?” Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, following Noteworthy News. May every animal always be treated with respect and cherished as a family member.

The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television. This week is the second and final part of two-part program on the appalling practice of hunting wildlife.

The US-based non-profit organization, In Defense of Animals’ (IDA’s) stated mission is “to end animal exploitation, cruelty, and abuse by protecting and advocating for the rights, welfare, and habitats of animals, as well as to raise their status beyond mere property, commodities, or things.” Since 1983 this group has been a leader in animal protection, including in the area of halting the murder of wildlife.

Over the years In Defense of Animals has stopped bow hunting of the Tule Elk and killing of peacocks at Point Reyes National Seashore, a park in California, USA, halted a planned aerial killing of wolves in Alaska, USA, prevented a buffalo hunt from going forward in New Mexico, USA, caused the cancellation of a hunting competition that would have meant the deaths of up to 1,000 bobcats, coyotes, cougars, and foxes in a single weekend in Arizona, USA, and successfully halted a bear hunt in New Jersey, USA.

Today’s program features further excerpts from an episode of the In Defense of Animals-produced television series “Undercover TV” entitled “What’s Wrong With Hunting?”

Undercover TV is hosted by Mr. Kenneth G. Williams, a vegan professional body builder from the United States and a spokesperson for In Defense of Animals’ veganism campaign. This superb athlete made sports history in 2004, when he won third place at the prestigious Natural Olympia bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, USA and became the first vegan bodybuilding champion in the United States.

Welcome to Undercover TV. Today we have a special presentation of the video, “What’s Wrong With Hunting?” This video exposes the animal cruelty that occurs during hunting. Some of the images are graphic and viewer discretion is advised.

If you look at the way that hunting language is used, even that is brainwashing because when you have a hunter talking about culling, harvesting, what they’re really doing is they’re killing a living being. They’re not harvesting a crop. But if you use that type of language, that’s going to then take away that animal’s personality in your mind. And so it’s to their advantage to make us think of animals as things. Animals aren’t things.

If you look at pain receptors, which are called “nociceptors” from Latin, in any animal, a non-human animal as well as a human animal, anatomically and physiologically they’re identical – same chemistry, same wave transmission, same sending impulses up the leg or up the arm. So if the receptors are the same and the chemistry is the same, we can assume that pretty much the same impact is perceived.

The other thing is logically, think what pain is telling you. Again, pain is to be interpreted as such an overriding negative stimulus that you respond to the pain before you have time to think about it. If it were not that negative a stimulus, then the species wouldn’t survive. I really don’t think that our pain is any more significant to us than the animal’s pain is to that animal.

We may be dealing with a different frame of reference, my philosophical or experiential background may be different than a beaver’s and marten’s, but still the pain and terror that I might feel because of a serious injury or a terrifying experience are the worst and biggest things in my consciousness. Similarly, the pain and terror for that beaver and marten is the worst in their experience of their consciousness.

The very first operation that I ever remember, we had a red-tailed hawk brought in to us, and it had been shot. Now there’s no way you can shoot a red-tailed hawk legally. It’s a protected species, it’s a migratory species, protected under international law, protected under federal law, protected under state law, there are incredible fines associated with (hurting) it.

This one had been brought in and it had a shattered elbow. And so we put it down on the table and the kids gathered around because that’s how we do it; we do it right in the classroom and we had the operating table there. They began to assist me and I was assisting them. And a little red haired girl, her name was Jenny Lynch, she was assisting me on the left side. She was holding some sutures.

And as we got into that, trying to repair that shattered elbow, Jenny looked up at me and she said, “How could anybody try and kill something that beautiful?” Well, I was a very intelligent, very gifted science teacher; and very gifted, intelligent science teachers know everything.

So I looked down at her, at Jenny, and I said, “Jenny, that’s just the way the world is.” What bothered me was the answer that I gave Jenny, “That’s just the way the world is,” which I look back at that now was an indictment of the world, that’s not the way the world is.

We are better than that. We are better than creatures that simply go out in the woods, armed with a gun, and shoot something from ambush just for pleasure. That is not how I see humanity, not how I see the human race.

Hunters hide and shoot from ambush. In the old West, they had a name for people who shot from the ambush, they called them “bushwhackers.” And there was no lower form of life in the West than a bushwhacker. Hunting is bushwhacking.

If someone I loved wanted to go hunting, the first thing I’d do is ask them why? Why are they going hunting? And the people who go sport hunting, they do it for the fun of it. And I guess because they think it’s macho and they have something to prove. Anybody who thinks that they’re more of a man because they carry a gun and shoot some animal that doesn’t even know they’re there, sorry it just doesn’t wash with me.

I think a lot of women feel that way in terms of you’re not more sexy or more manly because you’re able to shoot something. There is much more honor and courage to saving a life than to taking one, that’s the bottom line. And when you’re taking a life for the fun of it, there’s no honor in that and there’s no courage whatsoever.

We are, and we do what we’re taught. And we are not, and we do not do what we are not taught. And that’s the reason why I’m a teacher. And that’s the reason why everybody has got to be a teacher. Now I have a great hope that kids are going to begin to teach kids, and I’ve seen that happening a lot. I see that with my kids, they teach their parents, they teach other kids. And I tell you what, they’re a lot more honest than when I went to school.

Seventh graders know more than some people in their 60’s about what’s wrong with the world and what we need to do, and things that we need to make in the way of changes in our life, whether it’s our diet or how we treat our own suburban back lawn – chemical lawn treatment versus backyard habitat.

They’re so much more aware than people who are 30, 40, 50 years older. And if they’re starting with that awareness at such a young age, my hope is that we can build on that and end up with something very positive in the next generation.

The children of Rosewood, Oregon (USA) were brought to Washington. DC (USA). A whole class, by their teacher, and that teacher brought these kids to go into the offices of the Congressman not just from Oregon, but all over. And that was the main reason; one of the biggest bills ever passed for animals was passed because about two dozen kids from one little school in Oregon went to Washington DC and made such a fuss.

A lot of families have dogs and cats and those are animals also. And if they can see their own pets at home, the way as they see the wildlife that’s out in nature, the same way, and have the same respect, I think they could be able to get it. They have every right to be here as much as we do. Nature is just such a prize that was given to us, and I think we really take it for granted.

Next time you’ve got your cat or your dog on your lap, and you’re sitting there petting them, think about them, and what you feel about them. And then think about her. What really is the difference?

I don’t want you to do something cowardly, and I think hunting is a cowardly act. I want you to do something heroic. I want you to do something worthwhile. I don’t want you to go out and deride your enjoyment from inflicting pain and misery and death on another living creature.

Thanks for watching Undercover TV. If you would like more information about Undercover TV, please visit the In Defense of Animals website at IDAUSA.org Thanks for watching.

How can we help end hunting? We can talk to our friends and family and explain why it is wrong and inhumane to kill wild animals as they are gentle and kind in nature. Contacting our local government officials and expressing our desire to ban hunting is also important.

We can inform them that hunting has no place in the 21st century as the animals suffer grievously and that this indefensible activity severely disrupts ecosystems. Finally, we can set an example by following an animal-free diet, which is truly the mark of reverence for all life.

Many thanks again In Defense of Animals as well as Kenneth Williams and all others appearing in “What’s Wrong With Hunting” for sincerely seeking an end to the senseless slaughter of our innocent animal co-inhabitants.

For more details on In Defense of Animals, please visit www.IDAUSA.org
A DVD of Undercover TV episodes is available at the same website

Thank you for joining us for the Stop Animal Cruelty program. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, following Noteworthy News. May we all love and care for animals of all species.