What a Dick

Dick Cheney, that is (but I'm being redundant). According to AP, he went on a quail-hunting over the weekend, has a bird in his sights, turns around to track it, and sprays a companion (Harry Whittington) in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Not only that, but it happened in a game farm (link courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). The animals in question weren't wild quails. They were raised in pens (along with some mallard ducks), and then let out just before the hunters came. 

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

"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," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "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."  

What a fucking waste of God's green earth. Did they hunters eat all of the quails they executed? I doubt it somehow. 400 divided by 10 gives you a little more than 40 inedible lead-and-hamburger corpses each. Not only unsporting, but a little bit sociopathic. Would you like killing 40 birds in a row? I wouldn't. I'd rather do what my father does: watch them with binoculars.

(Links courtesy of Firedoglake and Steve Gilliard.)