Just read an interesting article over at the Mother Nature Network (the article was originally published in Plenty magazine in Oct. 2008).  In it, the author, a hunter, explores some ideas about why he hunts, and why hunters are fighting an uphill battle in our own defense. 

Personally, I was a little put off by the author’s tone.  He comes across as one of the elitist types, a purist who seems to think his perspective is the only righteous perspective.  By the end of the first part (it’s a three part article), I seriously thought about bailing and going to read something else.  I’m a little sick of people who want to put everyone else in their own box, and discount as failures those who do not measure up. 

I meditate on these things so often, I suppose, because I don’t find much commonality between myself and the folks who all too often represent hunters in the popular mind. In fact, there seems to be a pervasive disconnect.

But the idea was intriguing and I pushed through. 

In the second part, he tackles some ideas I thought I shared with him.  Primarily, his focus is how hunting has become a political tool.  I absolutely agree that the politics of hunting has taken the fore of the public discussion, in large part because we’ve found that we can’t really justify the fact that we hunt just because we enjoy hunting.  I also agree that special interest organizations have leveraged hunters and the hunting industry to support their political goals. 

But as he broke it down, I found that our opinions diverged significantly.  I think what hung me up the most was his tendency to jump straight to stereotypes, as he does to excess when discussing “canned hunts”. 

Basically, canned hunting is the shooting of animals confined within fenced areas. These enclosures, often known as game farms, are sometimes no bigger than a hundred or so acres. There are more than 1,000 such establishments in 28 states; patrons pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy the animals from the game farms and then “hunt” them inside the fence. In some cases, the quarry of these hunters is delivered by trailer just a day or two before the hunt, which means the animals go from handled livestock to hunting trophy in a matter of hours. Besides the obvious ethical concerns they present, canned hunting operations routinely cause pathogen outbreaks to spread from domesticated animals into the wild, free-ranging herds that many fair-chase hunters rely on for sport and food. Yet, in almost every instance where canned hunts are threatened by hostile state legislation, lobbyists portray the battle as an attack on “the heritage of hunting” rather than an attack on the dubious, irresponsible actions of people looking for a quick buck (pun intended). This ploy sometimes works, but fortunately, there’s a limit to its effectiveness. In 2000, the state of Montana, which has the highest per capita rate of hunters in the country, overwhelmingly passed a state referendum banning the licensing of any new canned-hunting operations.

He starts right off by offering up the most negative definition of “canned hunts”, and then lumping all high-fence and preserve operations into the same category.  He also uses inaccurate data (e.g. that they “routinely” cause pathogen outbreaks among wild populations) and applies a narrow definition of ethics to define how everyone should think. 

Sure, there are a lot of hunters who don’t like high-fence hunts, and the opinions are pretty bloody strong, too.  But isn’t this a perfect example of how a hunting practice can become a political tool?  Does anyone with the slightest hint of common sense really believe that eliminating high-fence hunting will turn the tide of anti-hunting opinion? 

High-fence hunts have long been a lever used by anti-hunters to divide the hunting community.  The agents play on the fact that most hunters don’t know any more about high fence hunting than non-hunters, and as a result, they’re susceptible to the negative stereotypes.  With all the hyper-ethical positioning by the hunting apologists, the suggestion of a practice so “unethical” as “canned hunts” is like dumping a pint of blood into a pool of hungry sharks.   

I’ve stated my position on high-fence hunts more than once, so I won’t tackle it again here.  But what the author has done in the piece is exactly what he claims to be indicting.  He’s segregated and attacked other hunters to further an agenda. 

It doesn’t justify his attack by hiding that agenda under the guise of… well, under the guise of what?  By the end of the second page, after skewering high-fence hunting and assault rifles, I really couldn’t figure out quite what this all had to do with whether or not hunting is compatible with environmentalism.

I guess he tries to bring it back together in the third part, and I almost found myself agreeing with him again.  In the second paragraph, he says something I’ve said many times, the gist of which is that hunters need to take a long, hard, and honest look at ourselves and consider the trade-offs between what we consider acceptable practice, and the non-hunting public is willing to accept. 

But then he slips up again, and falls back onto his moral high-horse:

…If hunters learn to accentuate those issues and distance themselves from others, we can easily offset the influence of a few Hogzilla scams and some unscrupulous trophy guides. And we’ll still have energy to take on the special interests and unsavory practices that cloud our moral clarity in the name of a bogus solidarity. Let those people go find their own history and their own terminologies, and see if they’ve got legs to stand on. My feeling is that they don’t.

The approach he’s advocating here is to cut out all of the other folks who don’t hunt according to HIS definition of an ethical manner… which is essentially to say that those “others” really don’t deserve to hunt.  Maybe the general idea is fine, until you start to multiply that by all the variations on ethical values between individuals and suddenly you end up with tiny enclaves of hunters united against other hunters.  Archers against rifle hunters, and western spot-and-stalkers against southern tree-standers, and so on. 

It’s a divide and conquer tactic that does NOT serve our community or the future of the sport.  As I’ve said before, we need to consider the basic fact that for anti-hunters, NO hunting is acceptable.  Nothing we can say or do will change the fact that they oppose to the idea of killing for sport, and no matter how we try to spin it, we are sport hunters. 

We need to address the egregious cases of abuse, the law breakers and scofflaws for example, and excise them from our community.  We absolutely should consider our true motivations for hunting, and be honest when we discuss our sport with non-hunters and antis alike.  We have nothing to be ashamed of, because we are doing nothing wrong.  And we should understand and accept that ethics, beyond a certain point, are purely a personal matter.  If we start judging other hunters based on our own moral standards, the result will be chaos and the eventual end of sport hunting as we know it.

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