WILL HUBRIS KILL THE HUNTER?

Sydney, Australia, 1981 – while taking his lunch-break in Hyde Park, a young man is approached by a radio personality doing vox pops. 

The Iranian hostage crisis has been running more than a year and there is much discussion about how and if the Yanks should end it. Some favour continued negotiations, while others think they should just rush the US Embassy and hang the consequences. 

“Sir (already a bit of a stretch, given my tender years), some say the Iranian Hostage Crisis has reached a pivotal turning point”, he says, demonstrating considerable élan for redundancy. “How do you think the US should proceed, further negotiation or should they storm the US Embassy?”

“I think they should send the terrorists a slide projector”, I say. “I’ve known big burly men to leap through second floor plate-glass windows in abject horror when my dad unpacks his slide projector”, I offer.

And it was true. In those days, nothing spread the influenza virus with quite the speed and efficiency of an invitation to attend the slide-night of some friend recently returned in a sharing mood from...wherever. 

I cannot help but think the hunting fraternity would benefit from adopting a similar aversion to the 3rd Millennium equivalent of the slide-show – posting selfies on social media. 

As I have said on many occasions, I believe the key to maintaining our hunting privileges lies not in convincing the anti-hunters that what we do is humane and responsible, but rather in preventing the anti-hunters convincing the general public what we do is inhumane and irresponsible.

The Australian public, on the whole, does not care enough one way or the other to oppose hunting or support it. But slowly yet surely we are giving the public reasons to think about their stance, graphic, full colour, increasingly high-definition and immeasurably bogan reasons.

Each day tens of thousands of images are shared that, taken out of context, provide ammunition aplenty with which the anti-hunter can undermine us among those who see only hunters smiling over the lives they’ve snuffed out.

Time and again I have heard it argued that such images portray nothing illegal, therefore what the Antis say about or do with them shouldn’t matter. This is a naive ‘argument’ that will be cold comfort when hunting is outlawed in response to public outcry. Public outcry the Greens & Co are already harnessing in their campaign to end hunting in Australia.      

Like it or not, what the public thinks does matter and the arrogant dismissal of the impact our own images have on our cause is one of the biggest hurdles we face in the battle to retain our privileges and preserve our culture. 

Pictures of bloody goat corpses, pigs with their mouths jacked open with sticks, even dead deer adorned with sunglasses and hunting parties posing with weapons pointed skyward ASIL-style, are manna from heaven to the anti-hunter.

Example of image taken from Facebook by media
for negative portrayal of hunters 

Youtube abounds with literally thousands of videos promoting the very worst in hunter ethics and just plain sociopathic behaviour and the presentation of some of our hardcopy publications is not much better. 

Magazine covers featuring unhelpful imagery abound in newsagencies, invariably situated at the eye-level of passing children, where they’re guaranteed to have maximum negative impact on parents loath even to acknowledge the reality that the lamb they’re having for dinner comes from – shock, horror – a lamb. 

The rise of vehement opposition to hunting coincides with the rise of mobile phone cameras and social media.  While once upon a time unhelpful images may have been obtained only by surreptitiously following hunters in the field with a telephoto lens, or by trawling magazines to find an incriminating image that slipped by a jaded sub-editor, these days we actually hang out virtual shingles screaming, "Evidence Within!"

In the final analysis hunting’s future lies, not in the hands of hunters, but in the hands of the vast majority of the voting public who don’t hunt. If we choose to stand by the belief that because something is not illegal the community must tolerate it, we will lose the war on hunting by virtue of our own juvenile arrogance and denial.

Do I think we should stop taking hunting photos? No! But I do think we should consider very carefully how we record our adventures and where we display our pictures.

A little self-regulation might be a good place to start cleaning up our act. If we see pictures posted that are clearly detrimental to our cause, at the very least we should comment to that effect.

Clubs and organisations that host Facebook communities should make certain their security settings are as high as possible. They should also take some responsibility for promoting and maintaining a standard, rejecting images that clearly breach it. 

The hunter should take the time to straighten him/herself up a little in preparation for a photo and the quarry should be cleaned of excess gore and propped in a manner that approximates the animal at rest, rather than head twisted back and tongue lolling to the side in a pool of blood, as is too often the case. 

If we posted photos of the skinned carcass, chops and haunches the quarry becomes, with half the frequency we post photos of the animal it used to be, we'd be doing ourselves a great service. The public is not so offended by the idea of an animal that'll make its way to the table, so why not post photos confirming that route?

Watch what you say about the quarry. Sharing stories about how far it ran after the shot and how many follow-up shots it took to finally bring it down, like going into detail about the size of exit wounds, is information you needn't share for the Antis to use against you.

Finally, going to anti-hunting Facebook sites and dumping pictures intended to offend, is puerile! "Hunters Aim To Traumatise Animal Lovers" is not a headline we want to court and frankly it surprises me we've not seen it - yet.

If you must share a sensitive hunting picture with your Facebook hunting buddies, do it via personal message rather than posting on your 'wall'.  You know there are people among your 'friends' who'd rather you didn't hunt, so why provide images for them to share with their other anti-hunting friends? 

In my view social media is not an appropriate medium for sharing hunting snaps. It is certainly the place where immediate validation and ego gratification are assured, but is the five-minutes of fame showered upon us by people we don’t actually know, really worth fanning the flames of opposition and ultimately the loss of our hunting privileges?

Meanwhile, there is an international campaign underway to force Facebook to ban hunting related images for "the offence these disgusting images cause the majority of people." 

Who knows, perhaps without realising it, the Antis are actually doing us a favour.

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...

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