Hunters and the Hunted
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A steady grey rain
patters in the forest as we tread silently, eyes slowly ranging from
one side to the other, listening intently to every sound. We hear
the distant crump of hooves, the warning call of a circling buzzard,
a muted roe bark. The sleek black gun dog walks at heel, and then
freezes, pointing and sniffing at the air. We stop and wait
patiently, and then walk on. The plaintive fawn call is used to cry
to the does; the bucks are indifferent, but during the rut they will
follow the does in. The pine, sweet chestnut and oak forest is
carpeted with a dense under storey of butcher’s broom, foxgloves,
brambles and nettles, and a still deer can hide here with ease. This
sodden evening, they are mostly silent. The rain dampens everything.
In the open glades, the deer can be seen from a distance, brown
against the grey gloaming of a July dusk. But in the forest, there
is alchemy at work. A deer appears as if from thin air, bounding,
thumping, and then freezing, and then melting away even though you
think you have all the angles covered. |
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A
buck stands tall between two forest-edge trees on the skyline, turns,
looks directly at us, appearing to know we are too far away to shoot.
The stubby muntjac are abundant. They step into the rides and peer, and
would be an easy shot, except we are not after them tonight. They too
seem to know. We walk on, the rain now heavier. Yet the forest floor is
still mostly dry. In the glades, though, the grass and bracken are wet
and heavy. We stop at fairy rings of churned soil, where bucks have
chased does in tight circles. But all is silent now. In the open, a buck
and doe graze on a hillside, but beyond them is a house hidden in the
trees, and an attempted shot would be inadvisable. The deer nearer
housing seem to know they are less likely to be shot, and take to the
open confidently. Deer learn quickly. Jim Rudderham tells a story about
his time with a forest agency, where almost identical vehicles were used
by both rangers and game control officers. A drive in the rangers’
vehicle would elicit many observations of deer; but a drive in the
slightly different sounding game vehicle would result in not one deer
being seen. Author Richard Prior believes that deer have a sixth sense,
that there is some kind of communication between stalker and deer. Deer
seem to know if people are out simply for a walk, or whether they are
stalking.
At
one level, then, this is simply a walk in the wood. But the stalk itself
changes our behaviour, increasing our intensity and concentration. You
look for signs, a bent branch or hoof print, listen to the birds, walk
in one direction, and then circle back in front of the wind. The deer
are canny. They will not be beaten unless you are quieter, and cleverer,
and lucky. This night, we do not take a single shot. This does not seem
to matter. Yet deer numbers do need to be limited, otherwise they would
cause too much damage to the forest and to nearby crops. But this is no
failure. You have to be quiet, centred, still and observant. You have to
be ready at any moment to take a shot, and yet know it may never happen.
When you do line up a shot, the world stops for a moment. You breathe
slowly, and then slower still. The pressure grows, and you understand
only too well the concept of buck fever – the inability to squeeze the
trigger when a deer is finally in the sights.
Today, in industrialised countries, the idea of hunting, whether for
food, ecological management or pleasure, elicits great controversy. It
is seen by some as the ultimate in cruelty to animals, and by others as
a direct link to thousands of generations of human history. Some point
to the contradictions inherent in those who happily consume domestic
meat or animal products, yet at the same time object to the hunting of
wild animals. Others raise questions about power and the gun, and how
some groups appear to use hunting as a means to control the land. Some
are more anti-hunter than anti-hunting. Another perspective focuses on
the needs of indigenous hunting peoples, and their moral relations with
the animals they hunt for food. Yet another might draw attention to the
visceral worries of families with small children living near national
parks where predatory cat numbers have so increased that they threaten
personal safety. Some say hunting is a tradition; others say so was
slavery. It does not take long to see that the issue of hunting and
being hunted raises fundamental questions about human relations with
animals, and ultimately where we see our place on this small planet. It
also suggests that the issues are so complex and contested, and so
rooted in the particularities of place and culture, that it would be
wrong to generalise about whether hunting is good or bad. Hunting is not
one thing. It is many things, and judgements must account for the many
social contexts and motivations, and the many ecosystems and types of
animals.
Despite the ten thousand year advance of agriculture, it is only
relatively recently that wild animals and plants have become unimportant
in the lives of people in industrialised countries. In many developing
countries, wild foods still make up a substantial proportion of people’s
diets, and in industrialised countries, older generations can generally
still recall a time when the wild harvest had a critical cultural as
well as nutritional value, from autumn berries and nuts to rabbits,
wildfowl and birds’ eggs. Today, modern food systems have encouraged a
forgetfulness about the land, such that “most of us are only dimly
conscious of our own personal ecology”, as author Richard Nelson
puts it. But this is not true for the remaining indigenous groups across
the world, whose relations with animals and the land are consistent
reminders of hominid pasts common to all our ancestors. Their voices,
rare today, demonstrate the widespread intimate connectivity that people
can have with nature, and their natural respect and understanding.
People who hunt and fish seem to have a number of reasons for doing so.
They talk of the escape, freedom and renewal that comes from getting
away from urban and stressed lives and out into the country. They
appreciate the direct connection with nature, the opportunity to be
intimate with the woods, to find the reconnection that remains central
to the lives of indigenous hunters. They also recognise the value of
companionship and the opportunity for story-telling. In an increasingly
atomised modern world, this value of social capital creation, being with
people you trust and who hold similar norms, is often forgotten. A
further reason for hunting centres on the exercise of technology and
control – the incursion of modern life and its technological
sophistication into what some see as a traditional activity. Finally,
there are biological reasons for hunting, whereby certain populations of
animals may need to be reduced in number, usually to limit damage to
habitats or to other wild or domestic animals.
People who oppose hunting do so for several important reasons too. The
most common is welfare concerns for animals, which usually centres on
the cruelty of the hunt and the mode of dispatch of an animal. Many are
anti-hunting because they see it as a sport or leisure activity, and so
are concerned about the moral position of killing for pleasure. Others
still see hunting simply as a primitive activity, something that belongs
to pre-moderns only, and so should be eliminated from today’s so-called
civilised society. Finally, many of those against hunting are also
anti-hunter. They oppose or simply do not like the people who hunt, and
perhaps see the opportunity to ban or limit hunting as a way to limit
the activities of certain social groups.
Where do these wildly differing views leave us? Mostly, it appears, with
a war of words, very little common ground, and policies that make
everyone unhappy. The late writer and philosopher, Edward Abbey, said
“hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about. Such a storm
of conflicting emotions.” Yet any close examination of particular
contexts, animals and people suggest that to generalise is to adopt an
absurd position. All hunting and anti-hunting is full of contradictions
and dilemmas, and to take one position that all types of hunting are all
good or all bad is to engage in a largely belief-based rather than
evidence-based view of the world. What should the anti-hunter say to an
Indian villager who just lost his daughter to a tiger successfully
conserved in a nearby national park? Equally, what does the ethical
hunter say to the city dweller who considers canned hunting and tower
shoots as an appropriate way to behave towards animals and birds?
At
the centre of the hunting debates is the issue of death. If we are to
eat, we must kill something else. If we are prey, then something else
kills us. Even vegetarians who eschew the consumption of meat have to
come to terms with the fact that their plant produce comes from
agricultural systems that raise domestic livestock and directly affect
wild animal populations. Let us start with some biological facts. Before
the advent of agriculture some ten thousand years ago, hominids survived
for thousands of generations as hunters and gatherers. We must have been
good at these activities, or we would never have made it to here. The
domestication of crops and livestock brought the need for different
knowledge and skills, and different relations with land and nature, and
later came to dominate modes of food acquisition for humans. Today, we
consume more than four billion tonnes of cereals and roots each year,
together with some twenty billion chickens, cattle, pigs, sheep and
goats. We now treat food as a commodity and have largely forgotten the
story about its production. George Wallace said this of an elk shot on
the Wyoming-Colorado border, “should I be sad? He lived better than
most... He didn’t stand corralled and knee-deep in snow and his own dung
waiting to be fed, ear-marked, dehorned and injected, only to be herded,
prodded, trucked and knocked on the head at the end of two years”.
Supermarkets have made us forgetful. Animals are mostly just cuts of
meat made ready for the stove, and no longer (somewhat) sentient beings
that have lives, and then bloody deaths. There was a time, a couple of
generations ago, when many rural families in the UK, and some in towns
too, would keep a backyard pig. It was fed on scraps and food wastes,
and would become an important part of the family. One day, the pig would
have to be slaughtered, and all the family would know it. Today, the
bacon comes wrapped in plastic, and you do not need to think of the pig.
Ruth Rudner says, “what has the ease of buying food done to our awe
of the animals that feed us? How awed is anyone by a cow? How many
people, for that matter, cutting into a piece of cow, remember its life
or have much interest in ingesting its spirit? How many ask its
forgiveness?”
But what if wild animals or birds are hunted for food rather than for
sport? Might some of our views be different? On the Isle of Lewis, men
from the fishing village of Ness have for generations travelled 60
kilometres every August to the uninhabited rocky island of Sula Sgier to
gather young gannets. In the Second World War, the gannet was called the
Highland goose, and was a major source of food in northern industrial
cities. Some 2000 of these guga are collected from nests on the
rock faces and killed, and later salted and stored for local
consumption. The meat is an acquired taste, said to be rather oily and
fishy, yet is a highly valued delicacy – not just for its nutrient
value, but because of the associated tradition and its long history
dating to at least the 14th century. Yet this tradition is
challenged by some animal welfare groups and bird conservationists who
see it as being cruel, and are campaigning for the practice to be
banned. There is, however, no evidence that the gathering has any
adverse effect on the overall population of the gannet colony. Is it so
very different to the harvesting of domestic chickens and turkeys, about
which people are considerably less exercised?
Is
this conflict over hunting, then, actually a symptom of modern society’s
increasing estrangement from the wild? Is it the lack of ecological,
land or nature literacy that reduces the understanding, and allows us to
take sides, and not to see the greys rather than the black and whites in
the arguments? This estrangement is a recent phenomenon, but it appears
set to increase as urban populations grow over rural, and food systems
become increasingly disconnected from the places of production.
One problem is that many who hunt keep quiet about their activities. It
is almost too complex an issue to engage in public deliberation. Yet
this is itself increasing the likelihood of hard positions being taken
by both sides. Perhaps this is partly because the ethical hunter’s eyes
are often turned inwards. They value deep personal bonds with nature, in
a similar way to indigenous people. Such a view is not easy to express
in a technology-led society. The late John Madison said a genuine hunter
is “someone with a deep personal bond to the game hunted and the
habitats in which it is hunted”. He said he searched for “that
flash of insight again, trying to close the magic circle between man,
wilderness and animals”. Admitting to the shaping and being shaped
is to take a different ethical, and possibly also spiritual, view of the
world. “When you go into the woods, your presence makes a splash and
the ripples of your arrival spread like circles in water… You can always
feel it when those circles stop widening; you can feel it on the back of
your neck and in your gut, and in the awareness of other presences”
Some of these views may be echoes of the past, but one thing has changed
in recent human history – we have become more tolerant of predators.
This is quite a remarkable shift. For thousands of generations, hominid
survival depended in part on avoiding being prey for larger and more
dangerous animals. Put yourself in a remote African savannah as dusk
falls, and the sky flames from orange and red to purple, and then
quickly darkens to a deep black, and you can begin to imagine the
challenges that bands of early humans faced. We cannot run very fast,
our teeth are small, our eyes are feeble in the dark. And the predators
that today we so enjoy seeing are better at all these things. It is a
bit of a mystery that we made it at all, or perhaps more accurately, a
testament to our capacity to work together in groups and out-think our
predators. In short, for most of our history predators were enemies, and
we were potential prey. Yet we now recognise that we have been so
successful, such emphatic winners in this war, that large predators have
been comprehensively eliminated from many ecosystems. And now we want
them back. Wolves to North America, Scandinavia and the Alps, snow
leopards to the high mountains, lions to savannahs, and tigers to the
Asian forests.
Hominids have been engaged in a long struggle to outwit
predators. Being prey may indeed have helped to make us human. The
hunted had to work together, value trust and friendship, and think their
way through the landscape. The hunters had to work together too, and
maintain a deep respect for their prey. The core dilemma, as Barry Lopez
put in Arctic Dreams, is “how can we
find a way to live moral and compassionate lives when are aware of the
blood and horror inherent in all life”.
How ironic too that so many of us now are concerned at
the killing of some animals, but not, apparently, of domestic livestock
in abattoirs. How sad that through our modern estrangement from nature,
we seem to have forgotten so much about how ecosystems work.
