FROM A DISTANCE: THE ANTI-HUNTERS' PERSPECTIVE

It has often struck me that the hard-core environmentalist's view of the natural world is somewhat egocentric. The language with which they describe the natural world and humanity’s place in it, smacks of a sort of divine apotheosis; as though they consider themselves raised on high, from whence they view all things as though through the eyes of divinities.

They don’t view humanity as just another stakeholder in the relentless struggle that is life on planet earth. Rather, they seem to consider themselves the guardians of all they survey, and final arbiters of humanity’s place in ‘nature’; that place being firmly outside it, looking in.

This attitude is perhaps most evident in the anti-hunters’ views on humans as hunters. It seems every syllable they utter, no-matter how simple or complex, boils down to the same message:

“Humans should rise above their primitive drives to hunt and kill. Such things are fit only for mindless beasts of instinct and necessity who know no better!”

The anti would have all humankind walking through the world without leaving a footprint, viewing it all from a superior, non-participatory perspective, much as God might walk through the world gazing at all that he had made and declaring it very good.

The anti-hunters appear to consider that their brand of non-participating observation of the natural world makes them somehow more “in tune” with it, and this I find strangest and most alien of all their philosophies.

"We don't own the planet. We're just managing it for future generations....or maybe a/god", appears to be their collective and very patriarchal attitude, and assuming this high-minded stewardship role sets them outside the fellowship of the eternal struggle that binds all creatures together.

All life on earth assimilates other life for its own survival; that is the nature of the eternal struggle. There are few exceptions to this rule. All creatures capitalise on some advantage – physical, intellectual or instrumental – in order to secure the basic requirements of daily life. The battle between hunter and hunted, predator and prey is not fair. It is intentionally and decisively unfair, just as nature intended it to be.

I have often heard it said that, “if humans want to hunt they should do it fairly, like the animals do it. The hunter should chase down his quarry and kill it using nothing but his bare hands”, which is an odd theory, given that all other animals exploit some advantage over their food. Nor is man the only creature to employ tools, yet it is specifically man’s use of tools (the gun and the bow) and the advantage this gives him over his prey, that the antis condemn most vehemently.

Another common view is the one that runs along the lines of, “man should pick on something his own size and see how he goes”, inferring that hunters should only wrestle with big healthy critters in the 80 to 120kg heavyweight range that are best placed to put up a fight he won’t soon forget, but this too naively romanticises the 'ethics' of other predators.

The lioness does not search a herd of Wildebeest for the heaviest, strongest buck that looks like he can give her a run for her money. The lioness looks for the aged-frail, the physically disabled, the malnourished social outcast, the newborn babe or the equivalent of the toddler, that’s her preference. Still sound noble?

The lioness has no concept of fair-play, nor is she familiar with the Marquis of Queensbury rules. These are purely human constructs, associated with the notion of ‘sport’, and this brings me to a point that the antis and I might actually agree on – hunting is not a sport!  Shooting may be a sport...archery may be a sport, but hunting is not.

Early European Hunters

When the hunter hunts for meat, skin, bone, fur, sinew or antler, it is a matter of survival and indeed a cultural process eons old, not sport. The level to which the hunted contributes to the hunter’s survival may vary with the individual, but regardless of whether he lives in the Amazonian rainforests and has to hunt every day, or in suburbia and chooses to do it only occasionally, the hunter who uses his prey to the utmost is participating in the eternal struggle. This is what affords the hunter the many intimate insights into participation in the natural world that the anti lacks so profoundly.

The fact that I may choose to survive by hunting and you by shopping, does not make me any less a man, but it does make me undeniably more a part of nature and its struggles than those who would roundly condemn me for my cruelty and inhumanity will ever appreciate.

“Ah, but”, the anti says, “humans have a choice!”, and this is often true. Certainly we have a choice to live a life devoid of killing, but does that make us superior, or just remote from what is natural?

Most who choose "not to kill", and criticise others for not making that same choice, are in fact killers by proxy, employing others to kill on their behalf. Even the vegetarian/vegan kills; he simply makes personal judgement-calls on the value of life, based on size, intelligence and charisma.

For instance, the rabbit is smart, fury, cuddly, big-eyed and seriously charismatic and so it is cruel to shoot him. Earthworms and bugs, not so much, so the vegan is quite happy to chop through thousands of their kind every time he turns his garden.

Oh he may make like a Buddhist and claim it fills his soul with woe, but he digs nonetheless....chop, chop, sorry, excuse me, wups, mea culpa, chop!

I’m unfamiliar with the philosophy that dictates that insects and cold blooded things are less worthy of respect than thermoregulating cuddly thangs, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that bugs and cold blooded creatures weren’t invited to the synod where it was all thrashed out.

The sheer romance of the antis’ view of the wild world is also noteworthy.  They will sit enthralled watching one of Sir David Attenborough’s excellent documentaries, in which the lion or lioness stalks a herd of antelope, and they will view the death that ensues without moral or ethical commentary. But should a human hunter kill an animal, any animal, he is instantly criticised, rebuked, abhorred.

More interesting still is what I've come to think of as the antis’ legal code. If a human hunter kills an animal – any animal – said animal is immediately declared ‘innocent’, which leads me to presume that if a lion kills an antelope, the creature must have been ‘guilty’, though of what I cannot imagine. Perhaps it’s a case of “wrong place, wrong time, serves yaself right ya stupid bastard”? That would certainly be a very Australian way of looking at it.

Perhaps in this there are lessons to be learned? Perhaps if, when trying society’s worst criminal offenders – rapists, paedophiles, murderers etc – the courts were to empanel 12 lions and lionesses good and true, we might finally see some hint of the ‘truth in sentencing’ we all crave.

The more I think about it, the more I am forced to conclude that it is not hunters or hunting that the antis truly abhor, but humanity itself. We may never know in what epoch some members of the human race first began to think themselves superior for their inability or unwillingness to engage in the eternal struggle, but it happened and I cannot say the race is the richer for the ignorance and intolerance the occasion has fostered.

I often wonder when the antis will turn on chimpanzees, for the humble chimp breaks all the anti-rules. He is clever, he is mammalian, he acts very much like a human and he uses tools to hunt other mammalian species. Oh yes, he does! 

Chimpanzees have recently been filmed fashioning spears, which they use to stab those dear little bushbabies with the super-cute big eyes, when they retreat into tree hollows. They have even been filmed using clubs to kill piglets. It’s clear the chimps don’t have to kill...I mean, there’s loads of fruit and bugs in the jungle isn’t there? And the bushbabies and little piggies clearly don’t want to be speared and/or clubbed, or they’d not run away.

And a chimp against a bushbaby, I mean....surely that’s the equivalent of a super-heavyweight going up against a chronic asthmatic grandmother who’s trying to flee the scene while burdened with heavy shopping? Hell, chimpanzees even smile with the apparent joy of successfully providing for the family. Shame on them for there reverse-anthropomorphism!

But I’m betting the chimps will be safe from anti-hunter victimisation for as long as they don’t figure out that chucking the spear will give them an even greater advantage over their quarry.  Or maybe they’ll continue to be immune from ant-hunter contempt even then, because they are not people, and it is people; people who do not agree with them, not hunters that the antis really hate.

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now....

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