Why I Hate — Really Hate — The Idea Of Hunting
It’s not just about the animals
OK look, I know.
The Medium audience is not the most NRA-registered, AR-15-owning, duck blasting bunch of people around. So, to some extent, almost anything that follows will be in large part an exercise in preaching to the converted.
But in an audience this large — 100 million active users, and counting — if even 15% of you are modern-day Elmer Fudds, that means a potential 15 million readers (that math was easy for once) will not appreciate a lot of what I have to say about the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to wildlife.
Where to begin? Well, at the beginning I suppose. To the extent that we are all a product 50 % composed of nature and 50% nurture, my sentiments about hunting are not all that surprising. Genetically, my family stock has not been overly active in this field, despite alternative involvement with firearms in the context of soldiering in the last great war. Nurture-wise, I — like so many others of my generation — had my opinions on the subject sandblasted into me at a very early age via the reading of the Babar books (his mother gets shot by a hunter: terrible tragedy) and watching Disney’s animated film Bambi (ditto). I ask you: how do you come back from that?
Despite growing up in suburban New Jersey, where receiving a BB gun after years of lobbying your parents was a rite of passage for most boys, I never quite “took” to the pursuit of trying to bag sparrows and squirrels, and to be honest neither did my friends. Perhaps with the Vietnam war going on at the time, it all felt a bit “small” … I don’t know. Later periods living in Europe and Asia were likewise free of pro-hunting influences.
But my distaste for the idea of hunting is not just a result of family inclinations or social environment. From as far back as I can remember, I had a fundamental revulsion for the unfairness of it all. If hunting is some sort of contest between a human and an animal, the human’s shotgun is to a fair fight what a calculator is to a 4th grade arithmetics pop quiz.
Think about it for a second. There you have Milton J. Rabbit, peacefully munching on a blade of grass in a meadow on a sunny April afternoon. Now as we are all aware, rabbits aren’t great at self-defense: there are no Krav Manga courses for rabbits or Stranger Danger leaflets circulating among the hare population. But they do have big ears, the better to hear predators approaching.
And here you have Dennis Peabody Hunter, having detected said rabbit at a range of, say, 60 yards. He lines up the cross hairs of his rifle scope to the rabbit’s little body while the herbivore munches on, impervious to the lurking danger. The rabbit can neither see, hear nor smell the hunter at that distance (even if the latter’s hygiene is subpar). And, as we all know from nature documentaries, this type of critter tends to remain pretty much immobile, transfixed even, during its masticating endeavour.
The rifle’s trigger is pulled, the little fellow instantly meets its maker, and that, as they say, is that.
Are you feeling the “unfairness” vibe yet? Are we really in the domain of “sport?” Or is this somewhat akin to putting a particularly meek cub scout into the ring with 1980’s-era Mike Tyson?
Now, if we really wanted a fair contest between man and beast, as a hypothetical World Interspecies Combat Federation might rule, the contestants should firstly be of roughly equal size or weight. So, for an adult male hunter, rabbits, geese and prairie dogs are out; cougars, fully grown rutting deer and welterweight bears are in.
Secondly, and most importantly: the lethality of the weapons available should be levelled out, so that one contestant does not have an unfair advantage over the other. This is only logical, in the same way — in keeping with our boxing simile — that a prizefighter cannot legally slip a horseshoe into his boxing glove when his opponent is wearing only standard Everlasts. So, once more for an adult male hunter, a decent-sized bowie knife would be allowed to square the odds against the fangs, claws or antlers of his intended prey. But certainly nothing allowing him to kill, unseen, at a distance.
Thirdly and lastly, to ensure absolute fairness, the hunter would be obliged to make some sort of a noise — and we’re not talking about using one of those duck call whistles — to signal his presence to his opponent, and in doing so formally initiate the contest. After all, our (by now quite weary) boxers, once again to use that analogy, are not allowed to sneak up on each other’s corners and deliver a devastating roundhouse to their seated opponent before the match has begun. They need to wait for the bell officially signalling the start of the bout, with both fighters alert and ready to trade blows. The same should apply in the nature arena.
Let me pre-emptively address the classic hypocrisy argument: that those who oppose hunting, and yet are not vegetarians or vegans, are guilty of a double standard, wherein animals raised and killed industrially for food don’t count, whereas animals shot almost universally for sport (the odd venison-oriented kill excepted) are mourned.
There is validity to this argument: one can hardly claim that putting a bolt gun to the head of a captive cow is any “fairer” than taking pot shots at fleeing pheasants. But as an occasional meat-eater with plenty of other arrows filling his hypocrisy quiver, I would fall back upon the distinction of killing (however horrible) for food versus killing for — let’s face it — fun. I think we’d all feel better about the neighbor’s cat devouring a caught finch out of genuine hunger, rather than just teasing it to death.
Of course, these days the market has come up with the perfect combination of the industrial-sourced “sport” kill, in which animals are bred and raised in captivity only to be “released” into a fenced-in area to be “hunted” by paying customers. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire!
My stance, I’ll admit it, has several further flaws.
One of them is that I like guns and know a fair bit about them. I don’t own any, but as objects they are pretty cool and can even, as with those gorgeously engraved Italian shotguns, be beautiful. As such, I have no issue with target practice, shooting ranges, or guns kept (even used!) for personal protection. I would be perfectly comfortable with people bolting 50 caliber machine guns to the back of their pickup trucks if I were not convinced that this would greatly exacerbate the road rage problem prevalent in our society.
Another flaw in my position on hunting is that, truth be told, I’m not adverse to shooting as a means of pest control: a sentiment ensconced within the wider sin of species bias, of which I am wholly guilty.
The hierarchy of my bias applies both to some species as compared with others, and within individual species themselves. Insects, amphibians and fish I’m not too bothered about. Birds get a fair amount of my sympathy. Mammals are close to my heart. But not too close, if we’re talking hyenas. Or rats. Or actual Tasmanian Devils. I should, to be consistent, abhor all forms of hunting across all of creation. But if a dear relative of mine is snatched from a riverbank by a crocodile and eaten, I will not be that upset if the local villagers catch it and make expensive belts and handbags from its hide.
But I digress. Hunting, purely as sport, is hard to justify for all the reasons stated above. But I would say the trump card in my deck of distaste for the practice is the type of “big game hunter” who travels thousands of miles and pays tens of thousands of dollars just to be able to pose for photos with a magnificent beast he has killed in exactly the same meritless way that our poor little rabbit at the beginning of this essay met his demise.
A driving motivation for these individuals is to manifest some form of “courage” or “manliness,” but they merely end up proving the opposite: a pathetic need to compensate for their very soft, unglamorous and boring lives back home. It’s no coincidence that poor old Cecil The Lion was killed by a dentist from Minnesota.
No, I really hate the idea of hunting. The notion that you can get up in the morning, get dressed, and gear up to go out and kill something for fun — in a way that is about as fair to the animal as is selling bogus crypto investments to retired folk — just rubs me the wrong way.
Hunters, do you really love nature all that much? Want to experience some real thrills? Do you truly like being around wildlife, creeping through the bush, and meeting an exhilarating challenge head-on? Then join one of those park ranger teams in Kenya tracking down and getting involved in shootouts with heavily armed poachers killing elephants and rhinoceroses for their ivory.
That, my friends, would be downright manly.
