In my long and shaggy life, I've known no better teacher than hunting. Nor are the
lessons hunting has taught me limited merely to woodsmanship. While I don't expect my nonhunting friends and
readers to fully understand this, my fellow traditional-values hunters surely will, to wit: In the big picture and
long view, much of what I've learned about the nature of human nature, including my own, I've come to by examining
differing attitudes about hunting.
As hunters, much is revealed about us - as an uber group (all hunters), as
diverse subgroups (rifle hunters, bowhunters, traditionalists, etc.), and as individuals -- through the ways
we hunt and kill, what we will and will not do to attain that end goal, and how we talk about it all.
Today, tragically, uber hunting-the big, amorphous "If you've seen one
hunter, you've seen ?em all" mob of slob-clones that most nonhunters view us to be -- has been co-opted and
transmogrified into just another sucker market to peddle stuff to. After all, as the Hunting Industry so
well recognizes, most hunters are just a subculture of the greater American culture, with all the same
vulnerabilities: busy, distracted people willing to buy anything that will make us feel good about ourselves without
investing significant physical or mental effort. The fact that few Americans, or hunters, today have any
well-thought, independent guiding philosophy in life, much less in hunting, makes us easy meat for predacious
marketers fronted by a grinning army of industry-sponsored Good Ole Boy Hunting Heroes who cajole us affably to
scurry to the slop-trough and pig-out on an endless feast of "sporting aids" guaranteed to dumb hunting down to the
lowest legal denominator.
The growing list of manufactured toys for Wannabee hunters who don't wannabee quite
badly enough to spend the necessary time and energy to do it traditionally and right, includes motorized decoys,
electronic game calls, solar-powered automatic "feeders" that spray out a load of bait at preset times each day so
that animals are conditioned to appear promptly at, say, 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., and their impatient executioners don't
have to exert any uncomfortable effort or unfamiliar patience to get the job done
fast.
And then we have the Mechanized Hunters, whose legs, lungs and spirits have been so
radically atrophied by easy motorized mobility that they can't bear to leave the familiar and comforting noise, fumes
and padded seats behind for anything, ever, anywhere, no matter how inappropriate, self-defeating, and
hurtful to the resource and other hunters ? not tragedy, this, but pathos.
I mean ? what's the point in setting out to do a thing half-assed? Why even bother when your only
goal is pretense?
But let's not get overly sympathetic here. Karma is a force in life only insofar as
we ourselves are the enforcers. Clearly, most "hunters" today don't give a hoot about any such "old
fashioned and obsolete" values as those embraced by a minority of "elitist" traditionalists. In fact they
laugh at us because we do care!
True hunting, by nature, is a back-to-basics, "doing more with less" exercise of
process over product; a joyful reconnect to our innate and intrinsic human/animal wildness, tempered by
respect for all living things, our prey and ourselves, as expressed by self-imposed limits and willing
self-restraint (that's the "sport" part).
No one grows stronger by hobbling around on crutches. No one grows wiser by ditching
school.
On The Wild Edge
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