From revered to reviled: hunting in the new millennium

Hunting was once accepted as an essential part of daily human life. Many a family lived in fear of shivering through a harsh winter without furs for warmth and a larder stocked with nature’s mammalian bounty to keep their bellies full.

 

While a couple of centuries ago cameras with which to record the outcome of a hunt were yet to be invented, there can be little doubt that a successful hunt would have been an event celebrated by the whole family, if not the entire community. Evidence of this fact can be found in various festivals throughout the world that have been preserved across the centuries, and also in cave-paintings dating back many thousands of years.

The hunter was revered for his skills with the spear, bow or snare and for the pivotal role he played in the sustainability of both his community and his culture. Today anthropologists agree that the development of technologies such as the knapped spear-point and the bow afforded our species the capacity to harvest large quantities of game reliably, and this in turn afforded our ancestors more leisure time in which to explore their intellectual development.

In short, while it is often said that Australia’s early development rode on the sheep’s back, it is also true to say that for countless thousands of years the development of the human race rode on the hunter’s back.

With the advent of ‘civilisation’, the cash economy, butcher-shops and supermarkets the need to hunt – at least in the developed world – gradually approached redundancy. This is perhaps understandable in an increasingly busy, largely urban society, but what is difficult to understand is the hunter’s transition from a once revered figure to the reviled villain he is often portrayed as today.

I have often heard it said that many people are incapable of drawing any parallel between a cow on the hoof and the steak on the styrene in Coles and this is certainly a contributing factor, though I doubt many are truly ignorant of where their meat comes from. No, if anything the vast majority of people know – if only in a plausibly deniable sorta way – that somewhere there are people known as butchers, whom they like to think of as a kind of religious order that oversees the spiritual transition of cows into steak, sheep into chops, and pigs into....whatever it is pigs become in the next ‘life’.

It is the capacity to rely on someone else to make animals into meat which affords people the privilege of looking down on those of us who choose to make our own meat. I call this the “Pontius Privilege”, I wash my hands of it, and so I’m not really to blame! 

But the Pontius Privilege doesn’t account for why so many seemingly intelligent people who claim to have a deep reverence and an all abiding respect for nature and its processes, remain so rabidly opposed to hunting, which is clearly an integral part of nature.

Many of the world’s most charismatic animals – lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, panthers, polar bears, wolves etc – are viscous killers that show no regard whatsoever for the concept of ‘mercy’. Yet the same people who revile the modern-day hunter will sit glued to the tele as a pack of wolves pursues, drags-down and disembowels a reindeer calf while its mother looks on.

My many inquiries of people who are all for animal-violence but dead against hunters hurting warm fuzzy things, reveal that we humans are supposed to “know better”.  We are of a higher order it seems, capable of determining right from wrong, good from evil, humane from inhumane, and this is what sets us apart from animals that kill other animals for food. But whatever your view on whether or not people should hunt, surely we must all agree that carnivores in the natural world have no choice but to hunt. In fact the precarious balance of each and every ecosystem depends on its apex predators, as diminishing their numbers has proven in any number of environments right across the globe.

In short, we respect and seek to preserve the viability of predators and their quarry in every instance, except when it comes to human predators, which so many members of the community will readily denounce as wicked, bloodthirsty or even uncivilised despoilers of nature’s delicate balance.

It seems that when it comes to humans, many believe that by removing themselves from the hunter-prey equation they somehow become members of a superior, more enlightened species. I would have thought it qualified them as a unique species, perhaps even a species ‘alien’ to the natural order of things on this planet, but certainly not superior.

A little further digging reveals that aside from the odd vegetarian who, given half a chance, would have Hyenas on tofu and lentils, it is not our carnivorousness that offends people so much as the fact that we do not hunt ‘naturally’. That is to say we use guns and bows and the like, and these tools are considered cruel and unnatural methods of harvesting meat, so those who use them are condemned.

I can only assume that were I to strip naked and head into the forest with a group of friends to run a deer down until it was cornered, that would be OK? Once cornered, of course, I could drag it down, chew into its neck and throttle it while my buddies in the pack kicked the life out of it before tucking in, and this would be natural...perhaps even an Attenborough moment?

It is not that we hunt that upsets people so, nor that what we do is unnatural, but rather what upsets them is the fact that what we do is so very natural that we are a constant reminder that humans are not the ultra-superior god-like beings that some people like to think they are. They are challenged by the fact that modern-day hunters are closer to nature’s battle for survival and evolutionary order than they can ever hope to be, and they lack the integrity, responsibility, courage and commitment to be a part of the ecosystems they revere.

Having failed miserably in their bid to be superior beings, they focus their efforts on criticising us for our gun and bow ownership, as a means of promoting a climate of fear and loathing of hunters. They do so in the hope that by comparison, their own flawed philosophies will shine all the brighter.  But that which the chronic hoplophobe calls a weapon, the hunter calls a tool, and while it is undoubtedly a fact that from time-to-time someone may use a tool inappropriately, it is also a fact that not everyone who robs a corner-store armed with a screwdriver is an electrician, and we do not seek to demonise all electricians each time someone robs a corner store armed with a screwdriver.

Ordinarily groups with a social justice bent would say that promoting negative stereotypes is unjust, even offensive, however when it comes to the vilification of hunters, groups such as The Greens have declared an open season!

If one member of the community uses a weapon inappropriately, The Greens waste no time at all in maligning all hunters and gun-owners, demanding their immediate disarmament for the good of the whole community. We are frequently accused of the most malignant intent and the most heinous crimes against man and nature, and our motives for hunting are misrepresented on a daily basis in order to serve The Greens’ political and social management ends. Hunters are routinely painted as untrustworthy, evil people who “kill for fun”, yet I have never met a hunter who claims that killing for ‘fun’ is part of the hunting equation. This appears to be a fiction of the green imagination, or perhaps an assumption based on their understanding of their own drives.

Still, despite the slings and arrows we are forced to bear, and despite venomous campaigns of lies and deceit aimed at eroding community respect for hunters, one unassailable fact remains. Without the activities of hunters throughout thousands of generations of human development, there would be no symphonies, no Shakespeare, no art beyond the cave wall, no great pyramids or cathedrals, no science and no civilisation as we know it.

All these things and more were made possible by the hunter whose bounty afforded his fellows the luxury of leisure time in which to ponder the meaning of life and how its quality might be improved. Even the freedom to denigrate our culture and beliefs today, was a gift from hunters of the past who have always been among the first to lay down their lives to protect such freedoms.

Our gifts and our contributions to society and our fellow human-beings have been many and of inestimable value. Even if The Greens’ and the anti-hunters’ campaigns of intolerance, hatred and bigotry prevail in the new millennium resulting in an end to hunting, its culture and traditions, there is one thing they can never diminish.

It is to the efforts of hunters of the past that they owe thanks for their evolution and the rights and privileges they take for granted and habitually abuse today.

Anyway, I’ll get outa ya way now...

Don't forget to visit and 'Like' Hunters Against Cultural Vilification of Facebook