Edmonton Sun Letter of the Day - July 30
LET ME get this straight. Ted Nugent, who says the "right to life means not dying (and) one way you don't die is to shoot stuff and eat it," thinks it's the animal rights activists who are "retarded?" (Nugent speaks out for hunting, July 17.) Nugent has declared, "I wallow in the cycle of life, don't you know?" Well, folks, that's not the only thing the bad boy of bow hunting has wallowed in. The Detroit Free Press Magazine says that when Uncle Sam called on Nugent to serve during the Vietnam War, "Nugent told Sam to go to hell ..." Nugent claims that 30 days before his draft-board physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days, he ingested nothing but Vienna sausages and Pepsi, and a week before his physical he stopped using bathrooms altogether, virtually living inside pants caked with his own excrement, stained by urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment. Apparently, whacking loses some of its appeal when your target can whack back. As far as unarmed targets go, even the "Predator Tedator" can't take 'em all. A newspaper in South Africa reported that Nugent paid to kill a rhino on a South African game ranch and then botched the job royally by wounding the animal with two arrows. Ethical hunter that he is, Nugent refused to let game ranchers finish what he'd started, claiming the rhino was "his" to kill. The injured animal escaped to die an agonizing and slow death. It's estimated that for every animal killed and recovered by hunters, two more are wounded and left to die slowly and painfully of blood loss, infection or starvation. Considering that Nugent "shoots at anything" (according to hunting guide Bobby Caires), one can only wonder how many animals, like the rhino in South Africa, have died slowly and painfully thanks to him. But, if they could, even the animals might say, "Better dead than Ted."
Paul Moore, staff writer, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(Sounds positively gruesome and a reminder of how driven some who call themselves hunters are.)