deardeer

About Dear Deer

Dear Reader,

Why, you may ask, are you reading someone else's letters? Who is writing them, and why? What would a deer want with mail?

Ever since I was very small, I was taught the golden rule: I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me. Even if other people simply can't follow the golden rule (babies, coma victims) or can but choose not to follow it (bullies at the playground, and their older counterparts), it doesn't give me any excuse not to.

Then I started to realize that the golden rule applies to animals, too. Sure, they can't follow it, but neither can babies, right? And no matter how hard I've tried to find something that separates animals from humans that makes it okay to treat them the way we do, I can not find one thing. And so, giving them — all of them, from bees to fish to chickens to rabbits to pigs to deer to tigers to whales — the benefit of the doubt, I do unto them as I would have them do unto me.

So: Imagine for a moment that you are a deer. You sit down at a computer and out of idle curiosity, type your own species into Google. The results are millions of pages devoted to your slaughter. Photos of you, bloody, eyes rolled back, head held up for the camera by smiling men and women and children, grasping your antlers. Guides on where to find you, how best to kill you, concentrated efforts to kill you off as you stumble starving through the forests in the winter, cut off from grazing lands by the latest highway or housing development. Accounts of long trips taken and hours spent waiting and stalking and hiding for a final payoff: shooting you and taking your body, or maybe losing track of you as you run, wounded, into the trees, to die later, pressed up against a tree trunk to stop the bleeding. Brochures advertising educational experiences and beautiful views of you in zoos. Recipes advising how best to cut your flesh, preserve your corpse, eat your body. Services offering to breed you with bigger antlers for a better trophy, to let you out of a cage at just the right time for a perfect shot, to carve your body open and mount your head on a wall. Accounts of spiritual enlightenment reached while killing you. Defenses of your slaughter, invoking the name of God.

How does it feel to see these images and read this text? Does it hurt? Are you afraid? Are you crying, shocked, mourning, angry? Do you feel alone or helpless? What does this feel like, realizing that this is what the human species thinks about you, that this is what they have to say about you? How does it feel, knowing that you can do nothing to stop this?

We, humans, are an exceptional species, for only we are capable of following the golden rule. But we arbitrarily apply it only to one species, our own — much as racists arbitrarily apply it only to their own race, or sexists only to their own sex. If we are going to abandon speciesism as we have (hopefully) abandoned racism and sexism, we have to ask ourselves: If we were deer, would we want humans to treat us like this?

These letters are not for deer, but for you and me. Deer can not use computers and they can not read. Even a dying deer with a bullet in her heart can not understand the enormity of what has been done and is being done to her species. Deer have no way to protect themselves, to band together and cry out for justice, to hide their children and their boyfriends and girlfriends and their parents and their friends and keep them safe. Will you do anything for them? What will you do?

Yours,
A

A first letter

Dear Deer,

It occurs to me that those people with the greatest appreciation for you are those who also like to hunt and kill you. Paintings of you have a kind of kitschy paint-by-numbers feel, and seem inextricably associated with guns, heavy dark-stained furniture, beer can collections and bright orange trucker caps. You deserve more.

Hipsters hang your picture, alongside "ironic" inflated copies of hunting trophies. Again, you deserve more.

I write today to tell you that I love you -- not in some "in killing you I save you from starvation and attain a higher spirituality" kind of way, and not in a "it's funny because it's backwoods, let's drink PBR" sort of way, but because you are strong, resilient, and still dignified in the face of such derision.

I know you have a life of your own, with your own concerns, motivations and objectives, and I apologize for my species' relentless insistence that you fulfill our fantasies of what you are. You are not a symbol or a commodity, I know this. I wish certain others would come to see this as well. Perhaps this letter, written more for our eyes than yours I'll admit, will help in some small way. I wish you all the best, dear deer.

Regards,
A