We generally don’t think about the cliches and idioms we’ve
grown up with; we treat them the same as simpler words. But whereas words like “dirt,” “water,” and
“run” translate easily into any other language, phrases like “it’s raining cats
and dogs” needs explanation to a foreigner.
“it’s raining really hard,” doesn’t convey the absurdity and violence of
the rain, nor man’s helplessness before nature, that are imbedded in “it’s
raining cats and dogs.” But then the
translator must go on to explain that we don’t say “it’s raining cats and dogs”
when it actually is raining that hard.* Idioms
are sandbars of meaning and sense shaped by, and shaping, the cultural
watercourse.
I grew up in a fairly traditional cosmos. God had created the world, filled it with
plants and animals, and called it Good.
His world had a defined hierarchy of creation with man as its crown and
steward, and He had given us dominion over the land and its animals. This didn’t give us a Nero-like carte blanche
to cover a chicken in tar and use it as a torch, but it did confer on us the
right and duty to keep animals for our own food and pleasure.
My dad and grandpa were farmers who, purely out of a
complete lack of interest, didn’t hunt.
That meant that when I started hunting as an adult, I carried with me
the Christian farmer’s attitude toward animals, but without any of the
sportsman’s vocabulary. In other words,
I had never heard phrases like, “respect the ducks” till several seasons on. So being new to me, I had to think about what
it meant. On the surface, it seems hard
to construe as a form of respect duping a bird into believing he’s found a safe
place to feed and fellowship, then suddenly blasting him out of the sky. Obviously, just like the cats-and-dogs bit, this
cultural alluvium didn’t mean we are supposed to literally respect the
ducks.
As a teenager, I worked for a few summer weeks on a chicken
farm. Every year, the farm would replace
the hens in one of its barns and would hire us kids to put pullets in the
cages. The barn had eight aisles between
rows of cages six levels high and stretching for what seemed miles. Each wire cage was about two foot square and
held six birds. For the next two years,
these birds would barely be able to turn around, flap their wings, or dodge the
shit from their overhead neighbors.
After that, they became McNuggets.
The job was terrible, not because of the heat, or smell, or noise—all
unpleasant, but pretty standard for the kind of agricultural work available to
teenagers—but because of what I felt it was doing to my soul. I wasn’t troubled so much by the fate of the
chickens (they’re just birds after all), but by the fact that we were
doing it. My own family kept a few chickens
for their eggs or meat, but we didn’t stop them being chickens. Was stripping these birds of their
chickenhood and rendering them merely egg-layers what God really intended from
the Crown of His Creation, a little lower than the angels? By doing this, we were debasing ourselves; I
watched my little sister accidentally snap a bird’s neck in a cage door then
throw it down in the manure pile as if it were a wilted lettuce leaf.**
When we say, “respect the ducks,” what we really mean is, “respect
the tapestry of creation that deftly weaves creatures in and out of each
other’s lives according to the Will of Divine Providence.” Or, in deference to our deist friends, we
might render it, “respect the Clockwork,” and for the atheist, “respect the
ducks.”*** Are you hunting to maximize
profit? or to destroy animals? Or are
you basking for a few hours in the world as it is meant to be?
The world as it was meant to be—and your place in it as a
hunter. A hundred and fifty years ago,
the majority of Americans lived on farms, and most of those who didn’t still
lived with horses, chickens, cows close by and with hunting as a common
pursuit. They were intimately familiar
with the life and death of animals. But
since 1920, most Americans have been urbanites, and as technology has advanced,
our experience has become increasingly more isolated from the realities of the
food chain. To most of us, “keeping
animals” means having pets, pork comes from a package in the cold case, and
hunting is something Elmer Fudd does. Weirdly,
this unfamiliarity and related squeamishness has affected the way hunters talk
about hunting. For fear of offending gentler
sensibilities, we speak of, “outdoorsmen who harvested game in an ethical and
humane way,” when we really mean, “men chased down and killed animals as
quickly as possible, by whatever legal means, for pleasure (and possibly for
food).” We have an interesting
situation where the anti-hunting crowd has a clearer idea of what hunting is
then most hunters do.
Catholic children are taught to perform an examination of
conscience with some sort of regularity.
Did I use bad language, disobey my parents, fight with my sisters, steal
anything… Whether you’re religious or
not, it’s a good practice to look in the mental mirror and review
yourself. As Socrates (or was it Ted
Logan?) said, the unexamined life is not worth living, etc. As adults, we can expand beyond, “I did
this,” to asking, “Why did I do this? And
why is it wrong?” Answering these
questions, and the questions that follow from them, provides us with the
understanding necessary to make the next set of moral choices. For example, determining what it means
to be rude and why it is wrong, can help us decide when it’s appropriate
to cut in line.
Life is full of choices embedded in circumstances that
require hashing out; for example, laughing at someone’s parallel parking, tripping
your enemy at the top of the stairs, or lying to a child. They vary in gravity and complexity, but all
these choices have some sort of impact on another person, and therefor are
easily identified as ethical choices.
But what about our interactions with animals? Taking an extra duck might mean shortchanging
the next hunter out of an opportunity, but it isn’t hard to conceive of a
“victimless” wildlife violation. What if
I adhere to the season and bag limits, but don’t purchase a license? Is another human really being harmed if I
don’t have a license? Well, the revenue
from sales of licenses pay for… wardens’ salaries. Sorry, habitat. What if I don’t buy a license before shooting
a dove (which isn’t reliant on the DNR’s habitat saving programs)? How is that unethical?
There’s a decent amount of subjectivity and double speak in conversation
about ethics in general, but when it comes to hunting, it seems to get
worse. I think it’s probably because when
we say, “hunter ethics,” we actually mean “sportsmanship.”
We can all agree that the “ethical” shot is one which has a
high probability of killing the animal quickly and leaving it in a retrievable
place. (I’ve never heard anyone suggest
what that actual probability is, but it’s certainly better than 50%--maybe 75%
would be acceptable?) But by that
measure, the ethical shot would be with a scoped .22 LR on a stationary bird. Yet we all know that shot is unethical. Why? Because there’s another axis in the ethical
cartesian frame: fair chase. A 100%
guarantee of a kill doesn’t leave the bird a chance to survive (just as an NBA
team playing a bunch of middle schoolers wouldn’t be a real basketball game). But it can’t be a truly fair chance, because,
as any hunter will tell you, a 50% probability of a clean kill isn’t an ethical
shot.
The fact is, we hunt for the fun of it. No one in North America must hunt to
survive. Sure, there are lots of people
who use game to supplement their groceries, and there a few folks who chose to
lead a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But
that is a choice, and they could just as easily choose to use SNAP, WIC,
and food banks. Cooking simple,
nutritious meals from scratch is fairly inexpensive and takes far less time and
money than hunting. If duck meat were my
main motivation, I’d raise ducks—it’d be far more efficient, and I could
control the quality of the birds (All ducks are NOT created equal. Can you tell on the wing which mallard just
flew in from up north and which spent the summer eating cheetos in the park?). But though raising meat birds may be
rewarding, it isn’t sport; and hunting ducks may require a lot of effort, but
it isn’t work. We enjoy chasing and
killing animals. It’s a sport. it’s a game.
Is it ok that we enjoy chasing and killing animals? Isn’t that a marker of a disturbed mind? “Neighbors said he was a polite, quiet man
who kept to himself…” We all recognize
the difference between the man who is dedicated to the procreative act and the
rapist. They both are enjoying sex—an
act for which humans, whether by God or Nature, are designed and destined—but one
is normal and the other twisted. Since it’s
only fitting that man should take pleasure in the necessary steps for survival,
we can say it’s not the enjoyment of killing the animal that defines a man as a
sadist. I put forward that what
differentiates the hunter from the psychopath is that one maintains an attitude
and worldview that resonates with Creation as it truly is, and the other has turned
the world upside-down and stripped actions of meaning. “Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women,
man.”
So if it’s in our nature to kill, and if it’s in our nature
to enjoy killing, why are hunters so embarrassed about it?
Just as we use “harvest” to whitewash “kill,” we
also speak of “ethics” when we really mean the “rules of our game.”**** The proof that it isn’t a matter of ethics is
in the inconsistency of it all. Shooting
a bird on the wing is preferable (in some cases mandated)—except with turkey,
in which case, it isn’t fair at all... A
turkey isn’t to be shot with a load of shot big enough to penetrate the body
cavity and disrupt the vitals like you’d use on a goose. And obviously, a rimfire rifle is completely
unacceptable for birds—except for forest grouse in certain states. Not making a reasonable effort to retrieve birds
is wanton waste—except for crows and starlings, which are good sport but not
good game. Last fall, it was unethical
to kill two pintails in one day, but this year, we can kill three without scandal. And so
on… You can’t build an ethical system
on such a waterbed of principles.
But that’s ok, because it isn’t a system—it's a sport. We
are sportsmen, and we make animals the object of our sport. Like all sports it has rules, and when people
don’t play by those rules, it isn’t fun anymore. When
you cheat, I enjoy killing animals a little less.
NOTES:
* Is our habit of using too much word born of mankind’s
subconscious pessimism? Or are we being
flippant in an effort to gain agency?
** This could lead to a long tirade about farmers tearing
out fencerows and tilling right to the ditch edge, but I’ll save that for
later.
*** I suppose one of the worst crosses the atheist must bear
is that of language: he can say whatever he likes, but the more colorful it is,
the less conviction he can say it with.
To “goddamn” something doesn’t have the same punch if you don’t believe
in a god or a hell. I suppose this ties
into why I love Peter Pan so much—for a few minutes, disbelief is
suspended, and I can live in a world with ferries. Then the movie ends, and the portcullis of
the adult world comes crashing back down.
“Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery,
hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping, than you can
understand.” And all that.
****Of course, most matrices that we humans place on our
world serve more than one end, and the usefulness of Hunter Ethics doesn’t stop
at providing a smoke screen for our primitive inclinations to enjoy hunting and
killing. It also can be a cudgel and a
set of heel lifts to beat down others and raise our standing in the hunting
world. A member of a duck hunting forum
recently stated, “When you think about it, if we all took ethical shots, we
would not have a need for all the gadgets, trinkets and baubles.” Is he saying that he doesn’t take ethical
shots? Does he fall prey to the promise
of gadgets? When decoded, what he’s
saying is, “I have invested the time, energy, and discipline to acquire hunting
skills, and therefore, moral high ground.
If everyone would simply recognize this and try to be like me, we’d all
be better off.” This jockeying for
position is itself another hunter-gatherer instinct.
