It may seem a little odd that a vegetarian who twice displayed a chicken head on her blog would have strong feelings against trophy hunting, but there it is.
It feels strange just typing it, but there's welcome news out of the (Republican-controlled) Senate Finance Committee, according to this Washington Post article:
The loophole Grassley said he is seeking to close allows big-game hunters to deduct some or all of the cost of their safaris if they later donate to a museum some of the trophy animals they kill and have mounted. The new rules would allow some donations, but would limit the amount of charitable contribution that could be deducted to the market value of the specimen, rather than the replacement value.Most of you know that even though I'm a vegetarian, I don't have nearly the level of antipathy for the eating of hunted meat that I do the consumption of factory-farmed meat. But by and large, I regard trophy hunting as wasteful, asinine and cruel. And while I'm not silly enough to think that Grassley and his cohorts were striking a blow for animal welfare, I'll take what I can get -- and that's the removal of a tax incentive to patronize these kinds of places:
The Senate language was welcomed yesterday by the Humane Society of the United States, which has sought to focus attention on the existence of hunting parks where exotic animals are raised and hunted for a fee. Some of the questionable trophy mounts donated to museums were killed in such parks, especially in several larges ones in Texas.But in the final analysis, this is just sensible policy:
"The equivalent for non-hunters would be if someone bought a sweater in Paris, donated it to Goodwill, and took a tax deduction for the entire trip to Paris," [Grassley] said. "The tax code should encourage legitimate donations, but only legitimate donations."
Go check out the entire article, if for no other reason than the strange hilarity of Charles Grassley working diligently at his desk with an enormous ungulate head in front of him.
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