Only humans kill for pleasure

Humans are contradictory creatures. Although many animals will assist the vulnerable among their own members, and a few will even adopt orphans of other species, we humans seem to be the only ones who will band together to help total strangers — people we have never met and may never meet, people of different religion, culture, and origins.

So we organize to help refugees in Syria and Myanmar. We fund charities that work in distant lands. And when a hailstorm of bullets felled a crowd in Las Vegas, we throw ourselves on top of others to protect them; we ruin the upholstery in our cars by rushing bleeding victims to hospitals; we risk our own lives to help others escape.

We have made compassion a primary virtue.

At the same time, we are the only species that kills for pleasure.

All other species kill only for food, or for survival. When they’re not hungry, or threatened, they do not kill.

I have seen lions and cheetahs calmly cleaning their fur, just like a house cat, while gazelles and wildebeest strolled by on the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania.

I have watched video of polar bears playing with dogs at Churchill in Northern Manitoba. Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall lived with great apes who could have torn them to pieces, if they chose to; they didn’t.

Not even scorpions and cobras kill for the sake of killing.

But Stephen Paddock fires thousands of rounds into an audience who had done nothing more offensive than listen to country music.

In London, a small gang of terrorists urge each other to kill everyone, to show no mercy. Mass shootings occur in Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Orlando, Austin .... Yes, they are exceptions. And no, they are not exceptions. They are simply extreme examples of the lust for killing that “lurks in the heart of man,” to quote an old slogan. Even among men admired as leaders. Teddy Roosevelt. Vladimir Putin. Ernest Hemingway.

Trophy hunting, for example, can only be killing for pleasure. The killer derives no benefit, beyond bragging rights.

Last week, a six-year-old female grizzly known as Bear 148 was shot and killed by a trophy hunter when she strayed out of Kakwa Wildlife Park in northwestern Alberta.

Bear 148 was well known around Banff and Canmore. A release noted, “The bear never hurt anyone but had gotten too close to people dozens of times...” She had wandered onto a rugby field during a practice. She had charged a parent walking with a stroller. She had chased dogs walking with their owners.

Alberta’s Environment and Parks staff felt they had to move her to the safety of the wildlife park.

Unfortunately, Bear 148 crossed the invisible border into B.C., which had not yet imposed a planned ban on trophy hunting for grizzly bears. And died for doing so. Cecil the lion made the same mistake. Until his death in 2015, Cecil was the most famous lion in Zimbabwe. Then, he wandered just outside the boundary of Hwange National Park. Walter Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota, killed him.

Two years later, Cecil’s son, Xanda, was similarly murdered by a trophy hunter.

After Xanda’s death, a flurry of online petitions tried to make it more difficult for trophy hunters to ship their body parts home.

The petitions primarily targeted UPS. UPS officials defended themselves. Their responsibility was to deliver packages, they said, not to determine what’s inside them.

Presumably, UPS would have had no qualms about delivering Lin Jun’s dismembered body parts after Luka Magnotta murdered him in Montreal in 2012.

Fedex claims to refuse trophy parts for shipping. So do at least four airlines: Delta, United, American, and Air Canada.

Australia and France have totally banned the import of trophy heads.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been, and continues to be, the world’s biggest importer of animal trophies. Sixty per cent of all trophy killings worldwide are shipped to the U.S.

Disincentives — like being unable to ship severed heads home to mount on a wall — might reduce the allure of killing for pleasure. Legislation too can defuse the instinct to kill.

Australia banned automatic weapons in 1996; it hasn’t had a mass shooting since. Switzerland has high gun ownership, but stringent gun control laws; it has had only one mass shooting.

Education and social pressure can discourage the urge to kill. More significantly, they can encourage the better side of the human paradox — the movement toward compassion, for all living things.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. His column usually appears Monday. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca.