In Defense of Hunting

Why have the debate?

I do not expect to convince anyone that hunting is moral if they don’t already believe so.  Nor do I pretend that I might be convinced by anyone’s counterargument that it is immoral.  I intend to go on doing it as long as I like it and can do it.  So why debate?  

         I suspect we bother because most of us believe as Socrates did that “an unexamined life is not worth living.”  But understanding is not without risk.

The risk of examining first principles

         Of understanding —or “explaining”—principle C. S. Lewis said, in the last paragraph of The Abolition of Man: “… you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.  You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever.  The whole point of seeing through something is to see through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles.  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1947)

The Pragmatic approach

         With a tip of my hat to Charles Sanders Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James and John Dewey members of the Metaphysical Club at Harvard in 1869, who synthesized and articulated pragmatism, I am going to cling to my belief.  As an aside, tenacity is one of the four methods of “The Fixation of Belief” articulated by Charles Sander Pierce: 

• Tenacity – stubborn refusal to entertain other ideas (fails to examine truth dispassionately and instead arbitrarily chooses a comforting belief).
• Authority – government decides truth according to its interests, not according to merit.
• A priori – development of sentiment arbitrary and subject to logical error. 
• Scientific – realities independent of our opinions yet affect our senses, so laws of perception allow us to ascertain reality as it actually is.

Pierce prefers the scientific method but makes grudging acknowledgment of the power of tenacity.

No perfect arguments

         My thesis is that hunting is moral.  Anyone who expects to find or to construct an irrefutable thesis on any aspect of human existence will go mad in the effort.  Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was an effort to devise an airtight system of logic with strict laws of inference that would sprout truths.  However, Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) proved that a “truth machine” is destined to fail. In everyday terms, there is always an exception to our rules and no mechanistic, rule-driven answer machine is possible.  That is to say, perfect arguments are impossible.

Animal versus human rights

         The first question is one of rights.  Every right is a binary set: a privilege to one class at the expense of another.  What right does Homo sapiens have to press his rights upon other species?  Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has become famous—or infamous depending on your perspective—for arguing against “speciesism” as he calls it.  His concept of rights extends beyond humans.  Among the natural extensions of his arguments is that it is moral to commit infanticide on infants severely deformed infants less than 28 days old because they have no consciousness of what it is to be alive.  He has been called a Nazi by disability activists and others.

         Without arguing this particular point, I note that his argument recognizes human consciousness as key in making distinctions and decisions.  The conclusion is that human consciousness sets us apart.

         What right do humans have to control and manipulate the environment and other species?  First, every living thing lives at the expense of another living thing.  To take a breath is to commit mass murder—of microbes.  We rest our self-formulated rights on the logical notion that we are more worthy of life than other species—consciousness makes humans more valuable than chimpanzees, a chimpanzee is more worthy, we conclude, than a rabbit, a rabbit more worthy than an earthworm, an earthworm more worthy than Spanish moss.  And ascending the list we accord more rights to each organism.  Is it right?  Is it moral? I don’t have an answer to the question.  The pragmatic answer to the question is that it inures to the individual and collective survivability and pleasure.  It fits into the great Darwinian game and we are doing what comes naturally to us.  In short, we have the ability to conceive of rights as a concept and to implement them and we do so based on a self-serving— in the Darwinian sense— system of escalating value with ourselves at the top.

What is “natural?”

         I cannot find a satisfactory answer in any dictionary.  Most entries focus on contradistinction to “artificial” and other indirect references to lack of human intervention. My definition: “unaffected by humans.”

         This is important because everything I read about defending hunting rests upon the natural quality of hunting.  Getting cancer is natural because cancers are created by mutations and mutations power evolution.  Cutting it out is unnatural.  But I agree that sometimes natural is better; sometimes unnatural is better.  The following parable captures the point:

         An atheist was having a hike in a wilderness area.

         It was wonderful—the mountains magnificent; the wind whispering in the trees; the rivers rumbling with awesome power; the animals beautiful as they cavorted to and fro.  “Ah,” he sighed.  “Nature is wonderful.”

         Just then he was startled by a roar and turned to see a grizzly bear charging, fangs glistening.  He ran but fell and turned to meet his fate.  “Oh, my God!” he screamed as the bear loomed above.

         Time stopped.  The bear froze.  The wind calmed; the river stopped its flow.  A bright light shone ‘round about him and a voice boomed from above: “You deny my existence and credit my handiwork to cosmic accident.  Do you really expect me to help you out of this predicament?”

         The atheist looked into the light.  “Yes, it would be hypocritical of me to ask at this point.  But how about this— if you really exist maybe you could make the bear a believer.”

         “Very well,” said the voice.  The light faded, the breeze returned, the river resumed its majestic course, the trees swayed, and the giant beast fell to its knees, bowed its great head and began to pray: “Father, bless this food….”

Axiomatic, natural defenses

         I find comfort in two axioms.  The first: Man should not be separated from nature by culture.  Homo sapiens has always been a hunter and not to hunt is unnatural. The question is: nature or nurture; DNA or learned behavior.  I suspect it’s in the DNA, or at least the DNA strongly favors the conduct.  Impressive evidence (see the Wikipedia page for scientist E. O. Wilson) is accumulating that much of our individual and group behavior is influenced by our genome.  Anyone who doubts this should ask themselves why rape is exclusively a male’s crime against females and take note of the elaborate and effective maternal rituals of mothers of all species, for which they need not one jot of instruction.

         Some argue that I could as well take a camera as a rifle or bow.  True, but it leaves something to be desired: the atavistic sense of completion embodied by the kill.  The stakes are higher and more primitive and being more primitive more satisfying.  The possibility of a kill is essential.  Ask any hunter if he had a good hunt.  Invariably the answer depends on game seen, not if a kill was made—an attitude summarized by the common hunter’s remark after the game has slipped away: “That’s why they call it hunting, not killing.”  Another phrase on the point is this one: “No one hunts to kill; but to have hunted you must.”

         The second axiom is that man should not be separated by culture from human nature.  It is a different way of saying that hunting is natural, that man is a carnivore.  “Hunting” is not a word that applies to anything other than warm blooded vertebrates from which man obtains meat for consumption.  Man is an omnivore—we eat flesh and vegetables.  Man has been pictured in popular culture as spearing woolly mammoths for food, but it is probably closer to the truth that man killed and ate a lot more rabbits than big mammals and scavenged a lot more meat than he killed.  Nevertheless, our tooth structure is omnivorous: we are equipped to tear meat from bone with our teeth.

         The length of our intestine in relation to our body length is relevant.  The ratio of intestine to body length in carnivores (dogs, lions, hyenas, etc.) is short: about 4 X.  In herbivorous animals it is much longer, about 25X.  The reason: it takes much more bulk of vegetable matter to supply the calories.  By this test man is closer to the carnivorous than the herbivorous.

A pragmatic, scientific defense

         However, the argument that rings truest is that hunting is “simulated predation.”  Hunting is the most natural way of controlling wildlife populations that have lost their natural predators.  White tailed deer in the northeast is an example.  The New Jersey Great Swamp Natural Wildlife Refuge was closed to hunting for many years.   The deer herd grew rapidly after closure and stabilized at about 600—too many to sustain in good health without damage to the ecosystem.  The land was over-browsed and there was net out-migration of deer.  The deer were smaller than normal and in poor health.  Carefully regulated hunting was reintroduced, and herd numbers fell.  Out-migration stopped, vegetation improved dramatically, wet-lands recovered and the herd grew back to about 600 larger, healthier deer.

         Trapping and artifical birth control—delivered by dart gun—are expensive and not nearly so efficient: hunting produces revenue instead of consuming it, and no state labor is involved.  

The moral way to hunt

         Have a hunting philosophy and live by it.

         Be respectful of the animal.  Don’t shoot unless you are certain you can make a clean kill.  Avoid taking a chance you might cripple an animal instead of killing it.

         Be respectful of the ecosystem.  Leave no scars and no trash; don’t make unnecessary noise.

         Fair chase.  No hunting behind a high fence.  If rifle hunting becomes too easy, take up bow-hunting or muzzle-loading.  Resist high-priced hunts on open ranches: game is so plentiful there is no challenge in the task.  I’d rather buy the venison at Central Market.

         Don’t shoot just anything—unless you want the meat.  Hunt for trophy animals.

         Learn the ways of the wild.  Study the animal ways and their interactions with one another and the wild.

How I hunt

         I like to go with friends.  It creates bonds.  The camaraderie is unsurpassable.  I love it. But when hunting, I like to hunt alone.  I want solitude from people and communion with nature.  I don’t want anyone to see me, nor do I want to see anyone else, even at great distance.  Encountering someone in the wild is invariably a major disappointment and discourtesy.  And when I am alone and I see, for example, a big bull elk or a trophy white tail deer, even if it’s far beyond range, I feel privy to a great secret, one nobody else on the planet knows.

Close

         The following is from Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.”  Written seventy years ago, it is not about hunting but derivative of it: 

The physics of beauty is one department of natural science still in the Dark Ages.  Not even the manipulators of bent space have tried to solve its equations.  Everybody knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse.  In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre.  Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.  An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost.