I am an animal lover in the unfashionable sense — not the kind that collects slogans, but the kind that looks at a living thing reduced to a prize and refuses to call it sport.
The defense is always dressed up as tradition, or conservation, or the right to do what you like with what you paid for. I’m not confused by the costume. A culture that can look at a living body and see only a trophy will look at people the same way when the lighting is convenient. That isn’t a metaphor I invented for a poem. It’s a pattern.
This is where my essays and my fiction end up in the same conversation. If a life — any life — can be filed under property, sooner or later someone writes the receipt. The same eye that studies the people in my novels is the eye that won’t call a carcass a souvenir.
If you came here for the books and tripped over this page, stay a minute. Attention is the beginning of ethics — and paying it is the least any of us can do.