Landers the target

Sometimes Rich Landers can’t win in this town, no matter how many awards he wins or to what extent he’s the best and most decorated writer at this newspaper.

Take for example the idiotic letters responding to his March 5 article, “Nothing humane about it,” in which he exposes the sham of the organized animal rights movement in this country while simultaneously making a mistake by responding to a letter in the Inlander from a far-fringe element of the far left, Chris Anderlik.

Anderlik and her fellow Animal Advocates of the Inland Northwest are the same true believers who threatened to protest a Sierra Club forum on hunting and fishing in Post Falls in 2005. For intolerant zealots like Anderlik, even the Sierra Club, whose collective tolerance for hunting and fishing is thin at best, is too far right.

As a conservationist who hunts and fishes and knows scores of conservationists who do not, I pity the black-and-white oversimplifications of secular evangelicals like Anderlik. For similar reasons, I pity Landers’ more frequent target, the lowest common denominator of mouth-breathing hunters and anglers.

Landers must be doing a good job if bunny huggers and bunny pluggers alike call for his head.

Jeff Holmes

Cheney