free hosting   image hosting   hosting reseller   online album   e-shop   famous people

A Hunting Rant

Not to long ago, my ex-Father-in-law and I were turkey hunting. Turkey hunting is not my idea of the best way to spend a day. You have to get into the woods at 3am and hide in the wet cold early morning waiting for these Thanksgiving meals to spot you, even though you are covered in camouflage from head to toe. If you move, these bastards will see you. Ask anybody who hunts, the North American turkey is the smartest, toughest animal to hunt period.

So why was I there? Besides loving to hunt, I can think of no better way to spend a day than with my ex-wife’s father. I respect and admire this man more than any other person I’ve ever met. When Tom Brokaw wrote his book about the ‘Greatest Generation’, he was speaking about this man and people like him. I would sit on a cactus and pretend to hunt Sasquatch for the opportunity to interact and learn from this venerable southern gentleman.

It was 5:30 in the morning and we had been calling turkeys for over an hour. Light had broke and was starting to push the dark of early morning from the forest. Dawn in the woods is an experience hard to translate to paper. You are aware of the wind creaking in the trees, the dew dripping off of leaves and pine needles, the scurry of an armadillo over the next ridge. Every sound, as silence is finally broken, creating a symphony of nature awakening to first light.

We hadn’t seen any turkeys although we had heard several hens when suddenly to the right of us a mature buck broke silently through the tree line like a ghost. He was beautiful with a deep red coat and a majestic wide 10-point rack that any hunter would covet. We must have attracted him with our turkey calls with curiosity getting the better of him. He was looking straight at us from 20 yards away, but he could not see us. His curiosity brought him closer and closer until he was just several feet away from the bushes we were hiding in. Then the wind shifted and he got our scent causing him to leap back into the woods.

The whole incident had lasted only moments but I felt as if I had held my breath for an hour. It ranks right up there as one of the most memorable hunting experiences of my lifetime.

As we came out of the woods and started across a field my ex-father-in-law commented that he was sorry that I hadn’t had an opportunity to shoot a turkey. At the same moment, across the field, the morning sun was cresting the treeline and the forest came alive with the sounds of birds and squirrels beginning to stir. I turned to him and told him that this was what hunting was all about to me, not the shot or the kill, or the missed opportunity, but the interaction with good friends and the beauty around us. He smiled quietly and we walked back to the farmhouse understanding each other completely.

None of my relatives hunt anymore. My father and my older brother exposed me to it at an early age; I took my first buck at the age of eight. But most of my hunting experience came later in life after I moved to the South. My hunting ethics come through the study of nature, reading about my prey, my surroundings, and by being out there. Being in the woods in the crystalline silence of sunrise is as close to a religious experience as I'm ever likely to have. As a responsible hunter you must try to join the chain, not top it. It can be a very humbling experience, realizing that they don't need you, and that, in the grander scheme of things, you don't matter. Hunting ethics come from within, and spring from respect. To know nature is to respect it.

Urbanization and modernization, processes that have removed most people from the rural roots of the hunting culture and shielded them from the natural processes it echoes no longer understand the experience. Death and food are no longer linked in many people's minds, and the hunt has become less a way of life than a primitive ritual, one that some would claim has no place in modern society. Yet these same people who eat dead animals, wear leather, and covet the leather interior as a must have luxury item in their cars call hunters murders and sociopaths.

Popular culture has come to rely on the politically correct stereotype of the hunter as a "gun nut," most clearly in film and literature. According to one recent study, film in particular tends to depict hunters as "obsessive, unstable, dangerous, anti-social [people who] cause great harm to other humans as well as animals."

It is my contention that hunting remains a uniquely valuable activity in our culture, one that for a variety of reasons should be defended as both an expression of the human place in nature and as a living link with the historical past. In my opinion it is important to have a connection to our collective past.

Environmental psychologist James A. Swan has written that hunting can be a spiritual activity, transcending the normal through "peak experiences" characterized by "intense emotional excitement and encounters with the deepest issues of life and death." He feels it is important for humans to recognize their role as natural predators (and prey) and that to avoid this truth is harmful. "Whenever we deny our instincts, we create problems for ourselves, those around us, and the world. In our inner nature we are all animals... As long as our psyches do not change, we will never be able to give up our hunting heritage. The hunting instinct is bred into the bone and blood of at least most of us and is one of the fundamental elements of human nature. Our challenge as humans is to find the best ways to express our instinctual nature."

Hunting, an instinctual activity governed now by science, technology, and the constraints of modernity, offers one way to express this element of human nature and to experience first hand the role of predator in the food chain.

Hunters are the stewards of our forests and wetlands, not PETA or any group of tree hugging radicals who stick spikes in trees to maim loggers. It’s not the Sierra Club or a fruitcake named ‘Moon’ who lived in a tree for a year; it’s the Bambi murderers. Hunters were the first conservationists. They were the first to recognize the need for scientific wildlife management, for hunting regulations, for law enforcement and they were the first to fund these efforts long before it was popular or politically correct to think about these issues. Hunting and fishing license fees and excise taxes fund more than 75% of all state fish and wildlife management programs, including those for non-game species. In fact, less than 10% of state fish and wildlife budgets come from general taxpayer funds.

Fish and wildlife agencies use hunters' money for species management, biological surveys, wildlife research and habitat improvement, access sites, shooting and field trial facilities, law enforcement, education safety programs and land acquisition. P-R funds have funded the acquisition of approximately five million acres of state-owned wildlife habitat, more than 1.6 million acres of waterfowl habitat, and the establishment of over 4,000 state wildlife management areas containing 45 million acres. In 1997, P-R federal assistance provided the states over $136 million for wildlife restoration that includes species management, habitat improvement, and wildlife research.

Even though the lands purchased with P-R money are financed completely by firearm users and archery enthusiasts, the benefits for non-hunters and non-game wildlife are tremendous. Nearly all the lands purchased with P-R funds are managed for wildlife and other public uses. It is estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of the people using these areas are not hunting. Almost all our National forests owe their origins to hunters who wanted to protect our natural resources.

Since the 1920's when certain wildlife populations were at historic lows, the dollars and efforts of sportsmen have achieved many notable successes throughout North America. Some examples are listed below.

	Then	Now
White-tailed Deer	300,000	20 million
Wild Turkey	30,000	4 million
Pronghorn Antelope	25,000	1 million
North American Elk	50,000	1 million
Wood Duck	nearly extinct	Most common breeding waterfowl in the Eastern U.S.

Whether it is species-specific interest groups like Ducks Unlimited and the National Wild Turkey federation or generic hunting conservation organizations like the NRA, the results are uncontestable. Ducks Unlimited stands today as a global force in wetlands and wildlife conservation. DU's conservation programs have evolved and expanded over the years to address the habitat needs of waterfowl and other wildlife all over the globe. Last year Ducks Unlimited spent 1.8 million dollars on wetlands conservation. When the National Wild Turkey Federation was founded in 1973, there were only 1.3 million turkeys throughout the United States. Since then, that number has more than tripled and now stands at 5.4 million birds.

According to South Dakota fish and game official, hunters and fishers contribute $3 million per day to wildlife conservation programs nationally, for an annual total in excess of $1.5 billion. They further estimate that sportsmen contribute $14 billion annually to the U.S. economy, and support over 300,000 jobs, about one for every 50 hunters. Conservation funds come directly from license revenues, excise taxes on sporting equipment, sales of waterfowl stamps, income tax check-offs, and financial support from hunting advocacy groups such as Ducks Unlimited.

What about the meat, is it wasted by trophy hunters? No. Plenty of hunting organizations donate the meat from their kills to the needy. Whatever it's called in your area Hunters for the Hungry, Sportsmen Against Hunger, Hunters Sharing the Harvest, the goal, and the way to reach it, are basically the same: First, hunters harvest their game. Then, through cooperative efforts with members of the hunting community, state fish & game departments, meat processors, food banks, sportsmen's associations, churches and charities, they donate it to those most in need.

Over the past five years, hunters have donated hundreds of thousands of pounds of game meat to those less fortunate. As programs continue to grow, it's estimated that approximately seven million meals are provided annually.

Hunting doesn’t just benefit hunters, the needy, and the woodlands; it benefits the animals as well. Many other methods have been used in attempts to curb population growth in common species such as the whitetail deer but none has proven as workable or cost effective as hunting in wide scale application. Evidence suggests this is because human alteration of natural ecosystems has dramatically increased the available habitat for many species while simultaneously eliminating predators such as wolves, cougar, bobcat, and coyotes that once kept populations in check. As a result these species often breed to unsustainable levels and are decimated by disease or starvation, often after degrading their environments to the point that other species are impeded as well. Anyone who is literate, or at least anyone who has watched the ‘Lion King’ knows about the ‘circle of life’ right? Overbrowsing by deer in areas where hunting is prohibited is the prime example of this problem, one that is most easily solved by regulated hunting scientifically guided to reduce populations and overall fertility.

Hunters are not drooling killers in need of a bloodbath to fulfill their desire to inflict pain on defenseless animals. A responsible hunter wants a clean shot and a quick kill to minimize the suffering of his target. Have you been to a stockyard or a chicken processing plant lately? If you ate meat or wore leather in the last year, shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear about how cruel hunting is to the defenseless woodland creatures. Who, by the way, are not defenseless. They are smarter than us, faster than us, hear and smell better than us, and in general are quite capable of evading us. Some, like the wild boar I prefer to hunt, like to hunt you right back.

Ann Causey, writing in Environmental Ethics, summarizes the position of the anti-hunting movement concisely: "Anti-hunters believe, instinctively, that it is morally wrong to kill for pleasure. Period." Hunters obviously do not share this belief, and there is little hope of finding common ground on the moral question. Causey, however, finds the entire debate lacking in purpose. "...the desire to hunt is the modern vestige of an evolutionary trait of utmost adaptive significance to early man. Though the urge to kill has in the past been reinforced by instinct, it is tempered in modern man by reason. This gives rise to the big conflict characteristic of sport hunting: the mixture of elation and remorse, of thrill and regret. It is instinct versus intellect... Is it morally wrong to wish to hunt for sport and to take pleasure in the occasional kill? The answer, it seems to me, is no. It is not morally wrong to take pleasure in killing game; nor is it morally right. It is simply not a moral issue at all, because the urge itself is an instinct, and instincts do not qualify for moral valuation, positive or negative. Thus the urge to kill for sport is amoral, lying as it does outside the jurisdiction of morality."

Hehe, hunting, the thinking man’s sport. Ethics have long played a traditional role in hunting, possibly stemming from the religious beliefs of pre-Christian animists who believed their prey possessed spirits that would affect future hunts if mistreated. Many Native American religions hold similar beliefs and require specific rituals before, during, and after the hunt. Such beliefs have survived in Western society in the care of hunters, who may regard them as ethical standards of behavior toward their quarry, and (in an ironic twist) are also found among many anti-hunters. Even utilitarian meat hunters generally place some ethical constraints on hunting practices, often stating them in terms of "respect" for animals. Hunters must rely on their ethics when faced with questions about what is "right" to do in a variety of situations, ranging from when or if to shoot to how long one must spend trying to track a wounded animal.

Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset believed that ethics were the dividing line between hunting and killing. He wrote that “The exemplary moral spirit of the sporting hunter, that manner of feeling, of taking up and practicing hunting, is a very precise line, below which fall innumerable forms of hunting that are deficient modes of this occupation. Hunting, like every human activity, has an ethic, which distinguishes virtues from vices.

What’s my code of hunting ethics? Treat the forest and it’s inhabitants with respect. One shot, one kill. Eat what you kill. Safety for yourself and those around you is your first priority. Enjoy what the hunt brings you.

Here ends the rant, now fuck off, unless you want to read more about it… then you might want to check out the bibliography.

Bibliography

Bender, David L., Bruno Leone, and Janelle Rohr, eds. Animal Rights: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1989.

Bissell, Steven J., and Mark Damian Duda. Factors Related to Hunting and Fishing Participation: Phase II: Hunting Focus Groups. Vol. 2. Washington, DC (?): U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1993.

Brown, Ben "Battling Animal Overpopulation: Deer Herds at Heart of Park Conflict." USA Today, March 25, 1993, pg. A8.

Causey, Ann "On the Morality of Hunting" Environmental Ethics 11:1989, pgs. 327-343.

Duda, Mark Damian. Factors Related to Hunting and Fishing Participation in the United States: Phase 1: Literature Review. Vol. 1. Washington, DC (?): U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1993. Miller, Harlan B., and William H. Williams, eds. Ethics and Animals. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1983.

[ back | home ]