Taking Aim at Hunting - Brief Article

Animals, Jan, 2000 by Brian Lavendel

Patricia Randolph isn't afraid to stand out in a crowd. Her home in a quiet, staid, rather exclusive neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin, is draped in a huge banner strung across the roof. "Save Our Black Bears," it shouts. On a warm day a makeshift cage, holding Caesar, her pet iguana, sits below the sign. Her white Jeep Cherokee sports nearly a dozen bumper stickers urging, among other things, "Be Kind to Animals--Don't Eat Them."

Randolph, an artist and antique dealer, isn't one to equivocate. In a part of the country known for its obsession with sport and recreational hunting, she is willing to stand up and say no, even if it means being unpopular. And that's just what she did.

At an annual meeting of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, Randolph decided the time had come for nonhunters to express themselves. "This is my home state, and I have a right to be heard and be represented too," she says of the congress, which holds ballots to advise the state's Department of Natural Resources on wildlife issues.

Fed up with a state wildlife management policy she describes as "skewing the environment to overproduce what [hunters] want to kill," Randolph pleaded with animal-welfare groups and environmental organizations to send their own members to the meeting, which gives voting rights to every resident in attendance. Next thing she knew, Randolph became the first antihunter to be elected a congress delegate.

Randolph says the vote came as a surprise: "I wasn't looking to be elected." But almost as soon as she took office, Randolph saw the potential of her new position. "It gives me an opportunity to speak out and to go into the lion's den," she says, straightfaced.

Since then, Randolph has voiced her stand on animal issues at meetings across the state, often in the face of nearly unanimous opposition. She started a group called RAVEN (Raising Awareness of the Value of Endangered Nature) and is circulating a petition asking citizens to take a "pledge to wildlife" that calls for signatories to attend the Conservation Congress hearings.

Randolph wants to see an end to bear hunting and a ban on steel-jaw traps. She's also hoping to prevent the establishment of hunting seasons on mourning doves, sandhill cranes, and wolves. Not one to mince words, she calls the hunting mentality "barbaric, foolish, and self-destructive. If you want to preserve a tradition, choose one that's worth preserving."

Not one to limit herself to speaking, Randolph has found other ways to spread her message. Last summer she displayed provocative art at an annual art fair in Madison. Oil paintings of farm animals done on recycled wooden boards, several of the portraits have one disturbing feature--they are framed with a fork and knife. "I call them my place mat series. It hasn't helped my sales, but it has gotten information out," she grins.

Why does Randolph feel so strongly? Simple--she loves animals. Randolph, who is single, seems to have taken on an animal family of her own. Sitting in her living room, she's surrounded by a menagerie of antique stuffed and carved creatures--oh yes, and a few live ones, including her three cats.

"When we kill animals, we lose the chance to have a relationship with them," she comments. "I find wildlife to be a healing force--friendly, curious, innocent. They are great friends and teachers."

Randolph doesn't think she's anything out of the ordinary, although the hunting community tries to slap labels on her--"out to lunch" or "extreme." She shrugs off the slurs and comes right back with a question. "What's this all about?" she asks of the state's management of wildlife for hunting. "This isn't about romantic ideas of the woods or survival; this is a high-tech war on wildlife."

While some are concerned with bagging the deer with the biggest rack, says Randolph, the natural world is in dire straits. And we're working against our own best interest. "Protecting wildlife isn't enough. We need to be actively helping." Randolph notes that in 1992, 1,700 of the world's leading scientists wrote a terse warning of the threat to critical biological systems posed by humankind's destruction of the natural environment.

"Biodiversity gives the web of life strength, it buffers us, sustains us," argues Randolph. "We have forgotten how much nature supports us."

Putting an end to hunting isn't enough in Randolph's mind. She says that we need to do more when it comes to protecting biodiversity. And the first place to start is with our diets. Pointing out that four of every five bushels of corn grown in the United States is consumed by livestock, she says our meat habit is the "driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests."

Randolph made the switch to vegetarianism after a breast cancer scare 20 years ago. She admits she still eats cheese, but says we should stop consuming dairy products as well: "Vegan is the way to go." Glancing up at a wall arrayed with her paintings of farm animals, one is hard pressed to disagree.

Brian Lavendel is a frequent contributor to Animals.