By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin and I may not have much in common, but we do share an early history of bloodlust.

We both got guns before we were teenagers. According to a report in the British Times
newspaper, Palin took a shotgun at age 10, crawled through the grass in
back of her house with it, took aim at a bunny “and blew its furry
little head off.”

For my part, I got my parents to let me buy a single-shot .22 rifle
when I turned 12, and proceeded to go out in the woods, alone and with
friends, to shoot at targets, trees, and the occasional animal. A crack
shot, I remember picking off what I thought was a dove perched at the
top of a tree a good 200 yards away. I nailed it, but when I went to
the base of the tree, what I discovered was a dead robin. Oh well.

A few dead animals later, near Thanksgiving, I got it in my head
that I wanted to shoot my own bird, so a friend whose family had a rack
of shotguns and I went out with two 12-gauges looking for turkey or
grouse. We had bad luck all day, though my friend Bob almost shot a
great horned owl that startled us, and which he mistook for a turkey
(luckily he missed!). Late in the day, and about to head home in
frustration, we flushed a grouse. As it started to take off, I got off
a shot and hit it, but not very well. It went fluttering off into the
brush. We chased it down and finally caught it. I picked the terrified
animal up and held it in my two hands, feeling its heart beating
frantically. The bird was bleeding from the shot that had perforated
its body, and it was looking around in terror and struggling to get out
of my grip.

At that point I started to cry. I felt like a monster. We didn’t
know what to do. I suppose I should have just wrung its neck to put it
out of its misery, but I didn’t have the courage to do that—to actually
kill a living thing by hand. So I held it out, and Bob put the barrel
of his gun to its head and fired. I was left holding just the
motionless body. Its “feathered little head” was just missing.

That was the end of my hunting. That realization that animals feel
not just pain, but terror, touched me deeply. I had always loved
animals, but until that moment, I had separated my affection for cats,
dogs, ponies and wild creatures, with the things that I would shoot.
It’s not terribly logical, but somehow, when I was young looking at an
animal through a gunsight reduced it to an object, instead of the
living, breathing, feeling thing that it really was.

For Palin, though, shooting that first rabbit was just the
beginning of a life of slaughter for fun. This Christian
fundamentalist, who believes in creationism and the preciousness of
prenatal human life, spent the intervening years since that first bunny
kill shooting God’s creatures of all kinds: moose, caribou, and even
wolves, which she has hunted from helicopter—probably the bottom of the
barrel when it comes to sportsmanship.

Now I know there are probably millions of Christian hunters who
have all kinds of rationalizations for why blowing away God’s creatures
for fun is in line with Bible teachings —“man’s dominion over the
animals” and all that stuff—but I have to say that I find her and their
lack of introspection troubling. (At the time the Bible was being
written, I doubt that hunting for sport even existed. People killed
animals for food.)

No doubt the gun lovers of America will love Palin’s story, but
there are plenty of Republican animal lovers who may be as revolted as
I am at her love of the kill—particularly of those animals like wolves
that are increasingly threatened even in Alaska, and that display such
intelligence and such socially interconnected and developed lives.

Just as it is jarring to read that a woman who, as a top government
official, actively opposes the teaching of sex education in the schools
sees no irony in having her own 17-year-old daughter, clearly in need
of some basic sex ed, get pregnant, it is jarring to me to see a woman
who claims to be a devout Christian reveling in the slaughter for sport
of God’s wild creatures.

Sarah Palin and I parted ways after our first few kills. Mine
converted me from a pre-teen gun nut into an anti-war activist. Hers
seems to have simply left her thirsting for more.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
available now in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net