A Bethlehem Request
	Contents: In Accompaniment The Divine Breath also Streams through Nature and Animals Tradition does not justify cruelty Materialism is drawing to an end Animals Need a Habitat The emergence of a modern “cultivated landscape” Peaceable Cultivation The unity of life Humans and animals again become friends The Laws of the Eternal Creator are Against the Arbitrary Hunt and Chase of Animals The Kingdom of Peace Becomes Visible How can you help?
	Further literature and links
	Download brochures and flyers
	Collecting signatures for animal protection and against hunting
	Contacts, Ordering Information
	How can you help?
	“Even $1,- helps!”
	Impressum

Whoever hikes through the Spessart runs into such things as left-over root vegetables, corn and salt. Many an animal friend’s heart warms over such care of the wild animals – until he turns and discovers a high shooting blind just a few meters away from where the food is lying directly in its line of fire. What he sees before him is the bait with which the wild pigs are lured into “execution by shot.” The feed is laid out like a last meal. The executioner carries out the death sentence from his comfortable high seat. He thinks of his action as a “hunting sport” that he practices as a recreational activity.

This is how sad it is: Basically, for the animals it is even a lucky thing if they are executed in this way, because they may die immediately. Often – estimated at 50% of all cases – they are only “shot ill,” as it is expressed among expert hunters. The hit deer, whose entrails are totally ripped apart, or the wild boar, whose jaws were shattered, drags itself, badly wounded, into the bushes where its young are waiting and have to witness the pitifully horrible death of its doe mother or its sow mother. After a few hours, the assassins begin their search, in order to stab the deer, or give the coup de grâce to the sow or to kill off the hare, and at that, by beating it with a cudgel or the butt of their rifle.

Such scenes play themselves out by the thousands daily. In their hunting magazines, the culprits rave about such “hunting experiences,” for example, the leading magazine on hunting called “Wild Game and Hounds” where the following could be read: “The late Fall sun slowly began to tire out and dark clouds covered the sky again. Finally the old lady (a doe) changed her mind and moved out onto the flat open field with her young. I waited until both fawns were within my line of fire. Before the second piece (one of the fawns) had understood that the one closest in line had been knocked over by a shot, it, too, received a bullet.”

The hunter then describes how the shocked doe mother looked at both dead fawns and then took flight in horror. But the executioner remains calm because he knows that the doe, as he writes, “follows her mother’s instincts, and sooner or later will examine the remains of her fawns.” Unfortunately, that is what happened. She came back. The hunter shot at her, but hit her too far back: “With staggering jumps, she sprang right in the direction of her fawns and collapsed directly before them ...”

Foxes are exposed to very special cruelties. They are considered competition to the hunters because hares are also a part of their prey – normally, these are the sick animals, which is why ecologists consider foxes a guarantee for a healthier hare population. But for the hunters, he is a predator that they bag particularly mercilessly and with greater joy.

One can read in the German hunting magazine that fox hunting is “particularly exciting,” which “a passionate hunter cannot pass up.” To this “passion” also belongs trapping, which often causes an endless death fight for the animals caught in it. Bleeding and in painful agony, they often lie for hours in the traps that snapped shut on them. Their young then wait in vain for their giver of food who’s fighting for her life; or in the end, even bites off its own paw to free itself from the trap and return to its family with its amputated leg. “Foxes are exemplary parents and faithful marriage partners.” (Dag Frommhold)

Alone in Germany, in forests and fields, a total of 5 million animals are killed by around 300.000 hunters, for whom killing is a nerve-tingling recreational pleasure and social event. They shoot from all sorts of barrels: a round of pellets at hares who scream in pain like little children; with expansion bullets at deer and wild pigs, which shoot out the blood and intestinal contents of the badly wounded animals as “stalking signs,” so that in their flight, they leave traces for the searchers; they shoot at foxes which are directly driven from their dens by the hunting dogs; from high stands they shoot animals that have been lured by animal carcasses and in hunting drives, they shoot the animals they have set into panic. And in their hunting magazines they assure one another of what a joy hunting is for them.

The breath of God was breathed out – a hunter mercilessly shot down the fox.The laws of the eternal Creator are against the wanton hunting and chasing of animalsIt is a puzzling thing that such a “recreational sport” has not been forbidden long since in a “civilized country,” whose inhabitants mostly consider themselves to be animal-lovers. Tradition, which lulled our ethical feelings to sleep, is no justification for the animal massacres. The time when humans hunted animals to survive has long since disappeared. If early humans had to kill animals, they asked their souls for forgiveness. Our forefathers from archaic times, from whom we claim to derive our hunting passion as an inherently human characteristic, would probably turn away appalled, if they were to experience how we shoot the animals down like shooting gallery figures. A part of the wild animals killed ends up as carcasses in the woods, the rest as carcasses in the stomachs of a few gourmets, who do not want to abstain from their rabbit and venison roasts. Our addiction to pleasure and its satisfaction is more important to us than the misery we cause to our fellow creatures. Perhaps we should remember Pythagoras, who already gave warning in the sixth century B.C. with the following: “Everything that humans do to the animals comes back to them.”

What is particularly awkward is when contemporaries who call themselves Christian take up arms in order to participate in the mass murder of animals. The commandment “You shall not kill!” was not limited to humans, and the peaceableness that Jesus of Nazareth taught was valid for all creatures. This is why the Early Christians strictly rejected the killing of animals. They lived as vegetarians. And according to the community regulations of the Hippolyth, hunting was not in accord with the Christian faith. Whoever went on a hunt was cast out from the community. Only when Roman paganism gained entry into Christianity and the Church became a state religion, was killing again permitted – of people and animals, equally. Since then, the Church considers animals as beings without souls, which are available to humans, however they may like, as objects of hunting and experimentation.

No one asks himself if he could imagine Jesus of Nazareth sitting in a high-rise tree blind. Hunters who calm their conscience with Hubertus masses should perhaps read the legend of St. Hubertus more carefully: He may very well have been a passionate hunter for some time; but then, for the sake of Christ, he stopped killing animals overnight, when he believed he saw a radiant cross in the antlers of a deer. To name this person as the protecting saint of the hunt and to bless the weapons of the hunters in his name and lay out before the church the dead deer and rabbits for the “worship service” of thanks for the hunt, is schizophrenia at an advanced stage. It was not for nothing that Theodor Heuss, the first president of the Republic of Germany, described hunting as a “variant form of human mental illness” and a “cowardly circumlocution for the especially cowardly murder of fellow creatures who don’t stand a chance.”

Publicly, hunters try to pass off their bloody pastime as something that is “ecologically necessary.” Leading ecologists have meanwhile exposed these lies justifying the existence of hunting. They refer first to a basic law of nature: “Uncontrollable population growth to the point of self-destruction is seldom found in nature, and mostly limited to ‘lower’ organisms like bacteria. Most life forms strive, one way or another, to avoid the inevitable collapse of the population through exhaustion or by growing beyond environmental capacity.

Two different strategies are applied first and foremost. The one is related to a strong, inner regulation of population growth that takes effect in good time; the other takes the almost always available possibility of avoidance from time to time. For in nature there is hardly any possibility for a population to develop in an enclosed space with the same kind of basic living conditions; not even the ocean, as the largest single contiguous habitat, offers the same kinds of conditions worldwide. For this reason, the search for new living possibilities before a location grows too small is a frequently used and completely useful option.” 16

Recent field studies in ecology have concluded that many animals possess an inner mechanism to regulate their population growth. For example, with elephants, it has been shown that it is not hunger or death, but the flexibility of the female animals at the beginning of their sexual maturity that determines the rate of growth. It is similar with foxes: “If foxes are not hunted and if there is sufficient food available, they tend to live together in family communities, which in the Fall consist of a male, ‘his’ female fox and normally, the young female foxes from the previous litter. Only the oldest female gives birth in this community, while her young daughters refrain from sexual activity for reasons of social factors not yet known in detail.” 17

When overpopulation threatens, the rate of birth drops. This has also been established with deer, elk, ibex and other large mammals. Even many kinds of birds hold back on mating, depending on the density of their population. When many of their contemporaries are shot down, the non-mating individuals in reserve become active and more animals are bred than existed before the murder of the birds. All in all, there is no need for shooting-happy hunters to create a balance of nature and animals; in the long run, it adjusts on its own.

This is also true of the relationship of red deer to young forest plantations: What first has to be established is that without hunting there would be far less deer in search of refuge in the forest. For a period of transition, plantations of sufficient young growth would have to be secured by fencing them off. In the long run, the proportions would cease to fluctuate, even here – not only through a decrease in the density of game in the forest, but also through a decrease in the hectic behavior of the game, which costs them “a whole lot of extra energy” that “has to be made up for by browsing on young shoots.” (Reichholf). Und finally, whoever wants to absolutely avoid the damage caused by browsing animals, practically has to eradicate deer under the existing conditions in Central Europe. A compromise between forest and game is unavoidable. “Forest is forest, even when smaller trees that bring lower prices grow there.” 18

The violent regulation of animal populations by humans is not only superfluous, but apparently harmful, as shown quite clearly by the example of foxes: When humans interfere in the social structure of the fox population with flint and trap, stable structures are broken down through the constant re-formation of their social relationships. Established territories and animal pairs are dissolved. The male foxes seek out alternating female partners and the average number of whelps increases per litter. And not least of all: Intense fox hunting in the fight against rabies becomes an unending absurdity. Young animals without a territory move into territories that become free. The rate of contact between foxes increases, heightening the danger of transmission. To this is added the fact that “in the social chaos of the intensively hunted field fox society, fights and even injuries are the order of the day,” so that “the rabies virus has the best chance of rapidly spreading.” 19

Meanwhile, the war of hunters against the animals has been rejected by the majority of the population. More and more people are unhappy with the hunters who act as if they were the lords of the forest, frightening away hikers and, with ever larger shooting towers, making open spaces in nature look like the garden of a concentration camp along the way. Hunting destroys everything: the life of the animals, the beauty of the landscape and the peaceful enjoyment of open spaces in nature by humans and animals. Whole species have already been eradicated. Wolves, brown bears, lynx and wild cats, beavers and eagle owls, elk and many other animal species are present in only very few regions, and their existence is threatened there as well. If hunters hadn’t had such an influential lobby in politics and society, their bloody recreational activity would have been forbidden long since.

At any rate, there is a growing counter movement in formation – an organization that is so powerful like the ring of German Nature Conservationists is demanding, for example, that a radical limit be placed on the catalog of animals open for hunting: all birds, beasts of prey like foxes, martens and polecats as well as smaller species of animals like hares should be protected throughout the year because their hunting is not only superfluous, but downright harmful.

The Gabriele Foundation welcomes such efforts that lead, step by step, to a ban on hunting. For the time being, it is creating habitats that are large enough to lower the hunting pressure on the animals. Animals should gain confidence and trust in humans and no longer feel they have to flee from them. This is why the foundation is acquiring fields and woods where the animals can live in peace more and more and find their way back to unity with humans.

For the hunters, this is a thorn in their flesh. To them, the woods are shooting fields in the first place. Wherever reforestation and the fencing connected with it endangers the game paths, massive resistance is put up by the “green coats” and their political adherents (primarily consisting of the “black robes”). Then it is of no help that reforestation is a part of governmental goals and is promoted by the respective authorities: Out of fear of no longer having enough animals crossing their rifle’s line of fire, suddenly the right to enjoy nature in the open fields is claimed, something no one was interested in earlier. Along their edges one has in the meantime long since installed a kind of death strip for animals. This is what happened, for example, along the edges of a wooded area near the town of Hettstadt. Whoever plants young trees there is supposed to create gates for hikers that are nowhere to be seen. In truth, it is about getting animals to change over from the reforestation areas to the town woods via the death strip guarded by shooting towers, from which they are shot down on the spot.

There are surely similar cases in other places. Whoever learns about these can report to the Gabriele Foundation about them so that the public’s attention can be drawn to it. For in the Bavarian Constitution we can read something well-known: “Animals are respected and protected as living beings and fellow creatures ... One of the primary tasks of the state, of towns and corporate bodies of public law is the protection of the woods due to their particular significance in sustaining nature and to get rid of damages as quickly as possible or counterbalance them, to nurture and maintain the habitat of indigenous animal and plant species.” (Art. 141 paragraph 1)
 

This noble ideal is not only anchored in the Bavarian Constitution, but has settled in much more highly, as the prophet Hosea 3000 years ago announced when he transmitted to mankind an important desire of the Creator-God: “And I will make for you a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground: and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety.” (Hos. 2:18)

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