Remember this: Sometimes you come across previous literature that just speaks volumes.
Excerpt taken from "A Hunter's Heart" Collected by David Petersen.
I am going to take this book back to the library tomorrow. I wanted to post it here for rereading later.
"If any one word characterizes most people's feelings when they reflect on the morality of killing an animal for sport, it is "ambivalence." With antihunters insisting that hunting is a demonstration of extreme irreverence for nonhuman life, thoughful hunters must concede, albeit uncomfortabley, the apparent contradition of killing for sport while maintaining a reverence for life. Yet I know of few hunters who do not claim to have a deep reverence for nature and life, including especially the lives of the animals they seek to kill. It seems that this contradiction, inherent in hunting and increasingly the focus of debate, lies at the core of the moral conundrum of hunting. How can anyone both revere life and seek to extinguish it in pursuit of recreation? The opponents of hunting believe they have backed its proponents into a logical corner on this point, yet the proponents have far from given up the battle for logical supremacy. Is either side a clear winner?
None who know me or my lifestyle would label me "antihunting." Most of the meat in my diet is game. And many is the time I've defended hunting from the attacks of those who see all hunters as bloodthirsty, knuckle-dragging rednecks.
Yet I have on occasion found myself allied with antihunters. But it's an uneasy and selective alliance, my antihunting sentiments limited to diatribes against such blatantly unethical behaviour as Big Buck contests, canned Coon Hunt for Christ rallies, and bumper stickers proclaiming "Happiness Is A Warm Gutpile."
There is also a subtler reason for my concerns about hunting, stemming, I believe, from my disappointment with the responses of many hunters and wildlife managers to questions concerning the morality of hunting. In the interest of enlivening and, I hope, elevating the growing debate, it is these moral questions, and their answers, I wish to address here.
To begin, I should point out some errors, common to ethical reasoning and to the current debate, that we should do our best to avoid. The first is confusing the prudence with morality. Prudence is acting with one's overall best interests in mind, while morality sometimes requires that one sacrifice self-interest in the service of a greater good.
While thorough knowledge is all that's required to make prudent decisions, the making of a moral decision involves something more: conscience. Obligations have no moral meaning without conscience. Ethical hunters do not mindlessly follow rules and lobby for regulations that serve their interests; rather, they follow their consciences, sometimes setting their own interests aside. In short, ethics are guided by conscience.
Another important distinction is between legality and morality. While many immoral activities are prohibited by law, not all behavior that is within the law can be considered ethical. The politician caught in a conflict of interest who claims moral innocence because he has broken no laws rarely convinces us. Nor should hunters assume that whatever the game laws allow or tradition supports is morally acceptable. The ethical hunter is obligated to evaluate laws and traditions in light of his or her own moral sense. Conscience is not created by decree or consensus, nor is morality determined by legality or tradtion.
Finally, it's all too tempting to dismiss the concerns of our opponents by questioning their motives and credentials instead of giving serious considerations to the questions they raise. Hunters do hunting no favors by hurling taunts and slander at their opponents. The question raised about hunting deserve a fair hearing on their own merits. Consideration of antihunting messages must not be biased by personal opinions or the messengers, nor should hunters' effort remain focused on discrediting their accusers. Rather, ethical processes of moral deliberation and personal and collective soul searching that these questions call for.
The first difficulty we encounter in addressing the morality of hunting is identifying and understanding the relevant questions an answers. To me, the most striking feature of the current debate is the two sides' vastly different understanding of the meaning of the question, Is hunting a morally acceptable activity?
Those who support hunting usually respond by citing data. They enumerate the acres of habitat protected by hunting-generated funds; how many game species have experienced populations increases due to mordern game management; how much the economy is stimulated by hunting related expenditures; how effectively modern game laws satisfy the consumptive and recreational interests of the hunting community today while assuring continued surpluses of game for future hunters; and how hunters, more than most citizens, care deeply about ecosystems integrity and balance and the global environment.
While these statements may be perfectly true, they're almost totally irrelevant to the question. Antihunters are not asking whether hunting is an effective management tool, whether it's economically advisable, or whether hunters love and appreciate nature. Rather they are asking, Is it ethical to kill animals for sport? Are any forms of hunting morally right?
The hunter says yes; the antihunter says no, yet they are answering entirely different questions. The hunter answers, with data, what he or she percieves as a question about utility and prudence; the antihunter, though, has intended to ask a question about morality, about human responsibilities and values. It's as if one asked what day it is and the other responded by giving the time. While the answer may be correct, it's meaningless in the context of the question asked. The point is that moral debates, including this one, are not about facts but about values. Moral controversy cannot be resolved by examination of data or by appeal to scientific studies.
An obsession with "sound, objective science" in addressing thier opponents has led many hunters not only to avoid the crucial issues but to actually fuel the fires of the antihunting movement. Animal welfare proponents and the general public are primarily concerned about the pain, suffering, and loss of life inflicted on hunted animals, and the motives and attitudes of those who hunt. They're offended by references to wild animals as "resources". They're angered by the sterile language and, by implication, the emotionally sterle attitude of those who speak of "culling," "controlling," "harvesting," and "managing" animals for "maximum sustained yield." And they're outraged by those who cite habitat protection and human satisfaction data while totally disregarding the interests of the sentient beings who occupy that habit and who, primarily through their deaths, serve to satisfy human interests.
Antihunters insist that nontrivial reasons be given for intentional human-inflicted injuries and deaths--or that these injuries and deaths be stopped are an imminently reasonable request.
Even when hunters acknowledge the significance of the pain and suffering inflicted through hunting, they too often offer in defense that they fell obligation to give back more than they take, and that hunters and wildlife professionals successfully have met this obligation. Granted, it may be that the overall benefits to humans and other species that accrue from hunting outweigh the costs to the hunted. Nevertheless, this utilitarian calculation fails to provide moral justification for hunting. Is it just, hunting's detractors ask, that wild animals should die to feed us? To clothe us? To decorate our bodies and den walls? To provide us with entertainment and sport?
These are the questions hunters are being asked. These are the questions they must carefully consider and thoughtfully address. It will not suffice to charge their opponents with biological naivete, as theirs are not questions of science. Nor will charges of emotionalism quiet their accusers, since emotion plays an integal and valid part in value judgement and moral development. Both sides have members who guided by their hearts, their minds, or both. Neither side has a monopoly on hypocrisy, zealotry, narrow-mindness, or irrationalism. Opposition to hunting is based in larges part on legitimate philosophical differences.
It has been said that hunting is the most uncivilized and primitive activity in which a modern person can legally engage. Therein lies ammunition for the biggest guns in the antihunters' arsenal; paradoxically, therein also lies its appeal to hunters and the source of its approval by many sympathetic nonhunters.
Hunting is one of few activities that allows an individual to participate directly in the life and death cycles on which all natural systems depend. The skilled hunter's ecological knowledge is holistic and realistic; his or her awareness involves all the senses. Whereas ecologists study systems from without, examining and analyzing from a perspective necessarily distanced from their subjects, dedicated hunters live and learn from within, knowing parts of nature as only a parent or child can know his or her own family. One thing necessary for a truly ethical relationship with wildlife is an appreciation of ecosystems, of natural processes. Such an appreciation may best be gained through familiarity, through investment of time and effort, through curiosity, and through an attitude of humility and respect. These are the lessons that hunting teaches its best students.
Not only have ethical hunters resisted the creeping alienation between humans and the natural out-of-doors, they have fought to resist the growing alienation between humans and the "nature" each person carries within. Hunters celebrate their evolutionary heritage and stubbornly refuse to be stripped of their atavistic urges--they refuse to be sterilized by modern culture and thus finally separtaed from nature. The ethical hunter transcends the mundane, the ordinary, the predictable, the structured, the artificial. " (Causey 80-85)
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
Sources Cited:
Petersen, David. A Hunter's Heart. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co, LLC, 1996. pp.80-85. Print.
Causey, Ann S. "Is Hunting Ethical?". A Hunter's Heart. ed. David Petersen. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co, LLC, 1996. pp.80-85. Print.
