The Face of Humans

After reading David Quammen's essay entitled "The Face of a Spider", i can't help but think about how many animals i have killed in my life.  I am not an adapt hunter or some psycho killer who enjoys to torture little animals, quite the contrary, what i am talking about is the amount of animals humans kill in a lifetime by eating the meat of an animal, stepping on animals, getting rid of rodents and pests, hitting a deer on the road, and fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.  I can bet that the number for every human is incredibly high, i bet it is even laughably high.  The question Quammen asks is how should we behave towards animals and quotes various writers of the "animal liberation" movement, "Most of the attention of each of these thinkers, though, has been devoted to what is popular (but not necessarily by the thinkers themselves) considered the "upper" end of the "ladder" of life.  To my mind, the question of appropriate relations is more tricky and intriguing-also more crucial in the long run, since this group accounts for most of the planets species-as applied to the "lower" end, down there among the mosquitoes and worms and black widow spiders" (Quammen 35).  After going off on these views, Quammen proceeds to put the invading black widow spawn in a jar and killing them with a can of raid.  But the question still remains, how do we treat other animals?

In my opinion, i like Quammen's theory of deciding on killing another animal, after looking the animal in the eye it is okay to kill it.  I agree with this theory because of my past background.  Growing up as a boyscout, we were taught the stories of the native Americans who believed that when they killed an animal that spirit was then in the meat.  Eating that meat put the spirit in the humans body.  I also believe that if people looked in the eye of all of their sporting kills of animals, that would truly change people's opinions of animals and our role in nature.  

-Billy T