The League of Animal Protection Voters
From Stu Chaifetz - [email protected]
www.HonorandNonViolence.com
Hearing to be held Thursday, Dec. 6 10:00 am Committee Room 15
Contact: Stuart Chaifetz 856-428-2635
In an effort to expand their 'recreation,' the bow
hunting community of NJ is pushing for a law to allow them to shoot and
kill deer on Sundays. Currently it is illegal to hunt on this day. The
League, it's member organizations and the 18,000 NJ residents it
represents are vehemently opposed to this legislation.
"Assembly bill 3899 and Senate bill 2463 steals from the
people of our state the only day in which they have to walk peacefully
in our woods," states Stuart Chaifetz, co-founder of LAPV. "When you
consider the rash of hunting accidents in the past few weeks, including
the killing of one man and the wounding of a 13 month old girl, we
should be restricting hunting, not expanding it."
The Art Of Bow Hunting: Wound The Animal And Let It
Bleed To Death
By its' nature, shooting an arrow into a living target
is an inaccurate and vicious way to kill that animal. In fact, bow
hunting is centered on wounding the creature who then bleeds to death.
Hunting magazines are full of articles that teach bow hunters the rules
of the game, such as when they should begin to track an animal that they
just pierced with an arrow:
"The rule of thumb has long been that we should wait 30
to 45 minutes on heart and lung hits, an hour or more on a suspected
liver hit, eight to 12 hours on paunch hits, and that we should follow
up immediately on hindquarter and other muscle hits, "to keep the wound
open and bleeding"." Glenn Helgeland - Fins and Feathers Winter 1987.
"For a bow hunter to easily recover a wounded deer, the
blood loss must be extensive. A deer will have to lose at least 35
percent of its total blood volume for the hunter to recover it rapidly."
Rob Wegner - Deer and Deer Hunting August, 1991.
"It is horrifying to think of any living creature dying
in such a slow, painful way," states Chaifetz. "What makes this
nightmare so much worse is that it happens to thousands of deer in our
state every year. The documented wounding rates that bow hunters inflict
upon deer are appalling."
In their report An Assessment of Deer Hunting in New
Jersey (p.25) the NJ Division of Fish and Game documented the percentage
of deer that bow hunters shoot but do not eventually find:
"Langenau (1986) found that archery deer hunters were
estimated to have retrieved 43% of the deer hit by arrows..."
The state agency that promotes and supports hunting
admits that bow hunters do not find 57% of the deer that they wound. In
the 1998-99 hunting season, bow hunters killed 20,975 deer. The 57%
wounding rate for hunting with bow and arrow means that another 11,956
deer were shot and wounded. Some of these wounded animals made their
ways to roads where they were hit by cars. Others, no longer capable of
feeding themselves, starved.
Bow hunting is barbaric entertainment that best deserves
to reside in the dark ages, not in the 21st century and not in a country
that deems itself humane. We must not only defeat the Sunday hunting
bill, but we must as a people turn our eye and conscience to this most
bloody and unnatural 'sport' and defeat it as well.
Go on to Puppy
Protection Act
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