I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that PETA opposes hunting. After all, it's a no-brainer: Chasing and shooting animals (with a gun or a bow and arrow) causes terror. Mates grieve, young animals can starve when their mothers are killed, and hunting leaves wounded but unrecovered animals to die slowly and wretchedly from blood loss, infection, or predation.

PETA works to end efforts to get ever-younger kids to take up this cruel blood sport because hunting teaches them to see other individuals as objects to exploit and "things" to kill—a very dangerous lesson. Every school shooter has been found to have hunted, and although not every kid who hunts will go on to gun down human beings, people who fire weapons at other living beings destroy a piece of their own heart.

In his article for Psychology Today titled "Do Some People Simply Like to Kill Other Animals?" Dr. Marc Bekoff offers some thought-provoking perspectives on the mind-set of hunters as well as on their self-deceit. Here is an excerpt:

I see no reason to kill other animals for a meal that isn't needed. Every time I read an essay about 'ethical hunting' it makes me reflect on a number of different and challenging issues. One that comes up time and time again is that maybe some people simply like to kill other animals and then offer a wide variety of excuses about their lust for blood (consider also the unrelenting war on wildlife including the wanton killing of wolves, the man who used a trapped wolf for target practice, and the egregious abuse of laboratory animals including chimpanzees). I can easily understand why some hunters offer that 'getting out in nature' or 'getting in touch with nature' or 'having quality family time' are important to them and that's why they hunt. But one can get closer to nature without a gun so there's more to it at least for some people, or so it seems.

I also don't understand how some people can deny the suffering and death(s) for which they're directly responsible. I find that when some people say something like 'Oh, I know they suffer, but I love my steak' it nauseates me. And when they say they love other animals and then kill them I like to say I'm glad they don't love me.

Many people want to rewild their hearts - reconnect with other nature - and it's incredibly easy to do without causing any harm. So, when will the unnecessary killing stop? I hope sooner than later because it's just not necessary to cause harm and to kill to have a healthy meal plan. So, do some people simply enjoy killing other animals? It seems they do or else they wouldn't do it.

iStockphoto.com/KeithSzafranski

What You Can Do

Help counter the cruelty of hunting in your area: Post "No Hunting" signs on your land and that of sympathetic neighbors and friends, join or form a local anti-hunting group, protest organized hunts, and spread deer repellent or human hair (from barber shops) near hunting areas. Also, before supporting any wildlife or conservation group, make sure that it opposes hunting.

The following is a cross-post from IngridNewkirk.com.

I receive new books every day—many wonderful books, such as Jason Hribal's Fear of the Animal Planet and Marc Bekoff's The Animal Manifesto—books that make you think and act, and that are great gifts to pass along. Today, God's Country: The New Zealand Factor launches. In it, authors Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison (two longtime, extraordinarily thoughtful and clever friends of PETA and animals) ask, "What if a relatively small number of human beings decided that they were powerful enough to stop the destruction of the world?"

God's Country is thoughtful, impeccably researched, and deeply moving. In the foreword, I describe it as bursting at its seams "with enough data to fill any reader's head with provocative reflection for years to come, hopefully for life. It should be seen as a lifeline that can be used to pull Earthlings out of the self-destructive waves of a turbulent sea—a sea that we have churned up as a species, but have the power to calm, if only we think clearly, look through a moral glass, and act quickly before we go under for what could be the last time."

In true PETA style, Michael and Jane "make short shrift of the disturbing and macho idea that caring—for others, the Earth, your own health—is a sign of weakness. With plain and honest arguments and stunning clarity, they show … that to care is a sign of true strength, character, and much more," I wrote. "The authors expose the 'survivalist' approach for the anachronism that it is," and they "lift the lid on what goes on in places most of us will never enter, from the very bowels of slaughterhouses, to those countless factory farms where animals are raised in pitiful conditions to be slaughtered. Their vivid, even clinical descriptions make it clear that Attila the Hun himself might be moved to shame if he were to consider what our species does to the others in this, the 21^st century."

You can download the book, and I hope that you will do so and share it widely. This book is a blueprint for action for any person who has ever given even a passing thought to what counts in life, including the Earth we live on. It should be nominated for a Pulitzer!

Written by Ingrid E. Newkirk

http://www.flickr.com/photos/memestate/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Socrates and Aristotle, make way for Fido and Rover. According to a new theory of ethics, the social order of dogs, wolves, and coyotes may be the best source of insight into the roots of human morality.

After years of closely analyzing the ways in which dogs play with each other, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce—whose new book Wild Justice is slated for a May release—concluded that dogs follow a rigid code that prevents their seemingly violent play from becoming a fight. By bowing to each other, showing signs of apology, and adapting their strength to the abilities of their playmates, dogs safely control themselves when they play, promoting fairness and preventing injuries. Bekoff and Pierce claim that the "moral intelligence" of dogs, "probably closely resembles that of our early human ancestors. And it may have been just this sense of right and wrong that allowed human societies to flourish and spread across the world."

Dogs frequently risk their lives to save their canine friends and their human companions. Seriously—you think you trained your dog well? What does it mean that it's really dogs who have trained us?

Written by Logan Scherer