Anti-hunting Facebook pages have begun appearing on the internet with greater frequency, celebrating the deaths and injuries of people and inciting hatred against hunters.
Despite containing threats of violence, hate speech, bullying and harassment to a degree that appears to breach Facebook standards, pages such as Hunting Accidents, Hunter Butchering Barbqueing [sic] & Recipes and Hunters are Scumbags have not been removed by Facebook.
A recent post on Hunting Accidents linked to a report that two teens had been shot dead while hunting in Montana, and subsequent comments included, “went all fuzzy inside reading it”; “That has cheered me up enormously”; and “got a feeling that prevented sexual assault of girls and bullying from those two”.
On another page, one post celebrated the apparent murder of eight Russian hunters in 2010. People have said hunters should be shot, burnt, and put in “gasenwagen”.
One person posted a link to an article about 14-year-old Noah Kennedy, granddaughter of John F Kennedy, shooting seals during a cull, and commented, “I’d like to do the same to her.”
In many cases, individual hunters have been publicly identified and held up for abuse.
Hunters have reacted angrily, inundating the pages with sometimes abusive and equally threatening posts.
The pages are being seen as more public indication of the beliefs of anti-hunting and animal rights extremists, whose actions continue to tread close to real violence against people.
Police are investigating accusations that the Animal Liberation Front was responsible for the beating to death of a hunting hound in March. The dog was dumped in the driveway of its owner, English hunt master Lee Peters. A car was also vandalised and marked with the ALF name.
Other UK-based animal rights extremists have boasted about sabotaging family-owned butcher shops and contaminating milk that was distributed to shops, among other acts of vandalism.
The milk was tainted with “an undisclosed substance” with “no intention of hurting people, only profits,” according to the group that identified itself as the Animal Rights Militia, but there are concerns that someone will eventually be harmed.
Meanwhile, other direct action is causing harm to people in different ways.
Last month, a group in England claimed it had hacked the National Farmers Union Mutual system and accessed account records.
“Our access is so complete that we were able to make subtle modifications to the accounts of several people we know are involved in the badger cull,” the hackers said.
“As more people are identified as being part of the badger cull we will exploit the details we have on them. We will show the same mercy to their finances that they show to the lives of badgers.”
The hunter hate pages are probably not run by people who would do any physical harm themselves, even though they are happy to incite it.
In the past, the characters of online abusers supporting animal rights have been exposed, notable in a Daily Mail article that investigated who was behind the vilification of a couple whose babies had been attacked in their home by a fox.
The journalist found of the abusers, “many are young women; one is a mother herself. All are on benefits”.
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