| There's nothing like public
controversy, expressed in the letters to the editor in the local newspaper to get a pot
boiling, and that's exactly what has happened here as hunters and anti-hunters have been
firing broadside after broadside, trying to convince someone that their opinions are THE
correct opinions. The recent
letter-writing battle began when many hunters felt insulted after Bloomington (Ind.) Mayor
John Fernandez initially refused to sign the 1997 National Hunting & Fishing Day
proclamation. In the process, someone at city hall made an unfortunate reference to people
being outraged by the Bloomington cat torture case; thereby implying hunters and fishermen
were in the same category as cat torturers.
Outraged hunters fired an initial blast of
letters that frankly surprised me. In 23 years of writing this column, I have never seen
so many hunters express themselves so publicly. Of course, the hunters' letters have
stimulated a round of anti-hunting letter writers, and it all makes great soap opera on
the "Letters" page.
There are a few cases where the various
letter-writers either failed to provide accurate information or provided incomplete
information concerning the nature of hunting, hunters and the hunted. Here is my short
list of these transgressions:
*Contraception. More than one letter-writer
wants the state to "dart" does with a contraceptive used to control deer in an
upscale Connecticut neighborhood a few years ago. It worked there, because the residents
knew every deer by name and could direct the dart shooters, telling them which does had
already been darted and which ones hadn't.
Now, just imagine trying to sort out which deer
have been darted and which ones haven't in a large herd of wild deer. I suppose some sort
of paintball could be fired with the contraceptive dart, but darting wild animals is a
labor-intensive, time-consuming proposition. And the prospect of darting tens of thousands
of deer has dollar signs all over it. Hey, as a hunter, I'm certainly willing to let the
anti-hunters dart all the deer they want, but not with the money I pay through licenses
and excise taxes on hunting equipment. It was those very funds and the hard work of state
biologists that brought the whitetail back in this country--mainly so hunters could hunt
them.
*Hunting Instinct. For some reason the question
of whether or not hunting is an instinctive human behavior has become an anti-hunting
argument. The anti-hunting crowd insists that hunting is not instinctive in humans and
that it is a 100 percent socially conditioned behavior.
This is yet another one of those nature-nurture
arguments that should have been buried a long time ago. The "nature" side of
these arguments usually claims that some certain behavior is genetically based, meaning a
species is going to engage in "X" behavior without major behavioral conditioning
to prevent it. The "nurture" side argues that no human behavior is genetically
based and that all human behavior is learned.
Fact is that no human behavior is ever 100
percent genetic or 100 percent learned. By definition, humans are "biocultural"
creatures, meaning that learning and genetics cannot be separated. Culture (nurture) is
our genetically driven means of adapting to the environment, no different at the
biological level than a bear's hibernation or a squirrel's nut stashing. At the same time,
most other animals do learn how to manage their genetic drives through experience or
learning, just like we do.
It is ridiculous to argue there is no genetic
component to human hunting behavior. Our genus has spent at least one million years
surviving on the hunter-gatherer model. We have transferred that behavior from hunting
wooly mammoths to hunting metaphoric mammoths in the marketplace in just the last few
thousand years. It seems unlikely our species will survive this transformation in the long
run.
It was within the hunting band that the need for
cooperation among band members arose. The result was the creation of hierarchies,
divisions of labor, religious behaviors of every imaginable kind, and, bottom line,
success as a species. Our ancestors didn't get us here by driving up in a Mercedes while
munching watercress and parsley, but by killing and eating all kinds of plants and
animals.
*Emotions. Both sides are way off in this
argument. I read one pro-hunting letter where the writer claimed animals other than humans
have no emotions. Then came an anti-hunting response claiming animals possess emotions
just like ours.
Do non-human animals have emotions? Anyone who
has ever had a dog or cat knows these animals have and display emotions. We know this at a
gut level, but the fact is, we can never really know. It is impossible to experience the
thought processes of another human, let alone those of another species. German animal
behavior experts have a word for this, umweldt. The textbooks translate this as
"worldview," and the Germans point out it is impossible for one species to ever
experience another's umweldt. It only happens in science fiction and in the
fantasies of the touchy-feelies.
*Eating Game. I am sorry to say there are lots
of hunters out there today who don't eat what they kill. This isn't what I was taught as a
kid. Take what you want, but eat what you take, and, never, ever, take more than you need.
The trophy hunting crowd obviously disagrees
with this position, but it is part of the conservation ethic I learned as a boy. I can't
see changing my position just because some dude wants to put a set of antlers on his wall
to show what a big man he is. If he killed it and ate it and displays the antlers
incidental to this, fine. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip. Stop and think about it. Just
how big a man does it take to kill any animal with a rifle, or even a bow and arrow? Not
very big, and smaller yet if the hunter kills only for ego-satisfaction. As Ernest
Hemingway said about fishing, just before blowing his brains out, angling will never be an
even match until the angler has a hook in his mouth too.
One of the worst memories of my childhood
involved a group of "hunters" who asked permission to hunt rabbits on my
grandmother's farm. Grandma let them. There were 8 of them with at least that many
Beagles. They killed every rabbit on the farm and left their carcasses lying in a huge
pile along the road. Seeing them made my grandmother cry, and there was never good rabbit
hunting on her farm again.
*The Kill. One argument anti-hunters use against
hunting is that hunters like killing things. Maybe at first they're right, but most
hunters will tell you the kill becomes secondary as the years pass. However, there is an
undeniable human attraction associated with shedding blood, whether it is another species'
or another humans'. This attraction is strongest with young males, maybe young females
too. Why do you think armies want young men as soldiers? Because they can be whipped into
a killing frenzy without too much difficulty, for one.
When humans go out and shed something's blood,
the bonds among that group grow stronger, probably because of the food sharing that
usually accompanies a kill. Doing anything together makes the human psyche vibrate, and
experiencing the reality of life and death together is the greatest bonding mechanism of
all. Look at the relationships combat soldiers form after living with death on a daily
basis for months on end. The bonds become so strong that soldiers often refuse to leave
the front in the face of certain death, because they are afraid their buddies will die in
their absence. The same phenomenon is at work when hunting non-human animals, even though
we know the deer isn't going to kill us. We want to be with our buddies when there is
killing involved.
*The Right to Hunt. There is no more basic human
right. One must eat before reproducing, and that's the big nut in species survival. Does a
cougar have the right to hunt mule deer? Do parasitic wasps have a right to paralyze
spiders and lay their eggs in their victims' still-living body, which the wasps' offspring
then consume upon hatching?
Oh, but humans don't have to kill deer to
survive these days, goes the anti-hunting argument. So, is it better that some guy in a
slaughterhouse does the killing so that the anti-hunting omnivores can feel better eating
their turkey this Thanksgiving? Absolutely not. Removing the reality of killing from our
daily existence only puts distance between us and the natural world, and this is not good.
It leads us to tolerate things like PCBs and companies like Westinghouse Electric and
Exxon.
11/29/97...Indy |
