Hunting- Philosophy for Everyone. In Search of the Wild Life, 2010. Nathan Kowalsky (Ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. This book is a reader that includes essays from twenty two authors of different persuassions and perspectives.
This work addresses the most disquieting and fundamental issues that had been around us, hunters and the wider social environment of non-hunters, in the past decades. For starters, it is a subject that makes all of us to face the stark facts of life and death. It goes straight into the issue of being predator and at the same time loving the animals we chase, kill, capture and eat. Deals on why hunters go into great lengths of personal sacrifice and expense to capture wild meat, collect trophies, experience campfire comradery, witness sunrises and become expert naturalists. After all, none of this is needed for survival after the agrarian revolution of 10000 BC.
The declared enemies of hunting, i.e. vegans, eco-liberals, animal rights militants, etc., have their say here too. Their artillery cannot be ignored. Hunting is bad because it is unilateral, hunters enjoys the hunt, their prey suffers it. Maybe it was necessary eons ago, but not now, not necessary anymore and it is inmoral. Besides, it is hypocritical. Environmental hunting, that is managing landscape to enhance game production has little to do with protecting nature but with killing and corporate profit. There is one ever present issue in this anti-hunting discourse, killing is bad, it is disgusting, goes against humane feelings, in summary it is one of the ugly faces of the enemies of life.
What can philosophers say about hunting? Few of them have dealt with this thorny aspect of human behavior. Among them, Jose Ortega y Gasset stands high and persuasive in his insights, he is quoted once and again by several. Hunting is more important to the ethic hunter in its process than in its conclusion. The air, rocks, trees and other aspects of landscape have a different meaning for the hunter. But more important of all, the essence of hunting to the Spaniard, is that the death of the game is not its sole purpose, but it is the sign of the whole hunting process. "To sum up, one does not hunt to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted". Not being myself an expert on Ortega I will leave him here.
Human beings evolved the last half million year the way they did because they became hunters of big mamals. As mere three feet tall 40 lb bipedal gatherers, not taking up our ansestors the challenge of turning themselves from hunted to hunters, there would have been no [censored] genera, even less sapiens species. Dependant on VitaminB12 , found only in animals; capable to digest elastin, an animal fiber; able to change ruminal made trans fats into cis linoleic acid; human beings made animal fats and protein essential parts of their diet. The voluminous human brain followed similar path, the social requirements of hunting and the benefits of a highly concentrated diet of protein and fat redenred this fundamental tool for sophisticated civilization. We succeeded in the complex business of evolution, from nut gatherers to cooked flesh eaters, from reluctant bipedals to skillful spear throwers, from prey to predators, to end up being the masters of nature's life and death cycle.
The paths to become an ethical and sound hunter must, among other things, to come across an understanding of the feelings of the anti-hunt coterie and on a deeper reach of the meaning of hunting. Several tools and insights are given by some authors in the last part of the book. Hunting is one effective and moral way to return to nature, to become more aware of its intimate workings. Ethical hunting is not a formula to be fair and ethical to the animal we hunt, but to be true to a code of conduct that it is only relevant to the hunter, because animals do not have ethics. Animal activists and eco-liberals abhor killing and predation by extension, in their ideal world predators of every kind, bipedals and quadrupeds, should be eradicated. Their Achilles' heel is an allieanated understanding of how nature "should" behave, because in the back their minds they dislike the very idea of death as an integral part of the evolutionary process. Death is the question that haunts the hunting debate. We hunters, openly or tacitly by re-enacting what our ancestors did for millenia, have found the vital paradox: The acceptance of death as affirmation of life ( pp. 180-181).
EJSXS
BTW: if there are more book reviewers, why not a book review section?
The sensored word is the Latin name of our genera.
Last edited by ejsxs; 10/11/12 08:55 AM.
