Thursday, December 11, 2003

And it was such great sport!

The Humane Society is not happy about Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent choice of entertainment. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Air Force Two landed Monday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and “Cheney’s security detail loaded him and his favorite shotgun into a Humvee” and drove to a private hunting club. There, the club released 500 farm-raised ring-necked pheasants, which Cheney and nine buddies proceeded to shoot. In all, the group killed 417 birds; Cheney alone slew 70, plus an unknown number of ducks.

The shooting spree prompted an outraged letter from the Humane Society. “This wasn’t a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals,” Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States, wrote in a letter of protest, according to ThePittsburghChannel.com. “If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets.”