Many people have written about hunting and occasionally I will find a quote that truly makes me think that this person was rattling around in my brain and expressed exactly what I was thinking but couldn’t elucidate.
I’ll include a few of these thoughts here….
Jose Ortega y Gasset,(May 9, 1883 – October 18, 1955) wrote Meditations on Hunting which is still the most quoted piece of literature on hunting.
“One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted…If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.
Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac is well known for this quote:
“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”
Snakey” on the Kifaru Forums, quoted an “old hunting article”…” from a back page story by Gary Sitton (writing as Jacob Bowers) Hunting April 1991. It was reprinted in last months issue of Hunting and is a good article as a whole. ”
“No matter what happens, whether you succeed or not, if you stand up and do it right and pay attention, hunting will always give you what you need. It may not be what you were looking for, but it will absolutely be important enough to justify whatever you did to get it.”
Many my favorites is from an author by the name of Edison Marshall from his book Heart of the Hunter.
“At that early age I had not yet isolated the fact, although I had seen it’s signs, that hunting is a lonely sport, that a hunter is essentially a lonely man, more often than a ‘lone’ man; and the bigger the game, the lonlier it gets”
“To judge from the trophies, the only legal evidence, the only record, they had a better trip. Yet there was another counting that only Dean and I knew. By that counting, made up of failure, success, dreams, facts, snow on mountaintops, or beaten in to my face, firelight and dawnlightand starlight, in truth countless imponderables, my trip was one to cherish all my life.”
What words on hunting inspire you, and make you think? What words describe what hunting means to you?
